Released the one and fifty three

[HundertzehnGustav]

my god... you have never spoken to a guy with less taste, and less sense of beauty.
my advice... will be your sinking.
okay. i will have a look, maybe i find a few worth being used. but do not trust my judgement too much, please.

 

[Armada]

Armada made some nice cannons with ropes for the light frigates. I bet Craiggo also has some nice cannons.

Heck no, I didn't make them! I'm not quite there yet.
They were part of the ships Craiggo gave me, and I believe they originated from some Russian mod.
However, I can (hopefully) separate them for other modellers to use if they wish.

Still, I like the cannons that Nightwatcher used. They're pretty much the best we've got, despite the poly count.
As for the rest of the work on this ship...

 

[nightwatcher]

Ok, her armament is ready and in place. The new cannons now have 1082 Verts and 1826 Tris each, thats roughly 1000 Tris saved pro cannon.






As there are ships with 40 and more of the older roped cannons, i don't think we have to worry about the polycount at this moment. Till later then.
I am eager to read your comments!

 

[modernknight1]

Beautiful!!! Schon!!

I wouldn't change a thing.

MK

 

[craiggbrown]

Hi Craiggo, really nice showcase of her. I kept one or two of hers in my actual playthrough, also i am able to command 3rd rate by now.

Every mast is an extra object and not attached to the hull. The shrouds i made so far are attached to the corresponding mast, so they will be lost too she is dismasted.

If the offer of yours still stand, i could give you the texture files for the other color variants. As MK suggested a flemish and an greenish one maybe. What do you think?
PS. I tried to zip the .psd's so you can work with the original files for qualities sake but they don't come under 297 MB with best compression selected. Do you know a good way of exchange with lesser MB?

Hey Nightwatcher, sorry, I'm on vacation. My offer still stands and go ahead and use 7zip because it has the highest compression rate, and upload them and the GM model and I will work on it. Do you want me to do the locators and sailorpoints/walkfile also?

By the way, Love your filigree! And your cannon! I say keep it they look good and period accurate to me! I like your creativity.

 

[morgan terror]

are you going to use the high-poly guns for the lower deck or just the gunbarrels? you won't see most of them anyway.

 

[nightwatcher]

Hi Craiggo, really nice showcase of her. I kept one or two of hers in my actual playthrough, also i am able to command 3rd rate by now.

Every mast is an extra object and not attached to the hull. The shrouds i made so far are attached to the corresponding mast, so they will be lost too she is dismasted.

If the offer of yours still stand, i could give you the texture files for the other color variants. As MK suggested a flemish and an greenish one maybe. What do you think?
PS. I tried to zip the .psd's so you can work with the original files for qualities sake but they don't come under 297 MB with best compression selected. Do you know a good way of exchange with lesser MB?

Hey Nightwatcher, sorry, I'm on vacation. My offer still stands and go ahead and use 7zip because it has the highest compression rate, and upload them and the GM model and I will work on it. Do you want me to do the locators and sailorpoints/walkfile also?

By the way, Love your filigree! And your cannon! I say keep it they look good and period accurate to me! I like your creativity.

I upped the texture file to the FTP. As always under "nightwatcher/one_and_fifty_three". Erm.. "textures.7z"...
And don't forget it's almost for sure that i did'nt used the best texturing technique...

As for the model i will need maya then. Would it be possible to change my status to "modders" so i could access the maya version on the ftp? Or can someone with maya convert the model for me otherwise?

are you going to use the high-poly guns for the lower deck or just the gunbarrels? you won't see most of them anyway.

The lower decks got the barrel only, and these barrels where truncated to the front part so they use very little poly's.
I must say that i like the look of the 24pnd on the lower decks and 8-12pnd on the maindeck. For the game they are the same, but the feel is another with two separate models used.

 

[nightwatcher]

Erm, ok i forgot to include the Coat of Arms texture. It sits now on the ftp too. And a nice and relaxing vacation craiggo!

As to not make the 3rd post in a row edited this.

Her almost finished aft.

 

[craiggbrown]

I'll get your status changed and I uploaded the various tools including Maya into the general FTP folder for you and anyone else who needs them.

Nice stern on her by the way!

 

[morgan terror]

the pictures look more like a mosaic than stained glass to me. it's a rather tricky thing to do convincingly do though. the left and right windows are obviously stained glass (though they could do without the mosiac texture), but the middle one isn't.

also, i'd think the gunners would have some trouble reloading the guns with the barrels sticking as far out from the hull as they do. the gun does have some recoil, but not that much. the distance that they potrude from the hull should be cut in half or so, but i'm not really sure how you'd be supposed to do it. the guns themselves are pretty well proportioned already, though i'd need to look up some pictures to properly compare.

 

[nightwatcher]

Many thanks craiggo, I will look in maya shortly.

You are absolutely right about the windows, Morgan. I did have to search a while to find a few possible pictures for the windows and then reworked them in PS, the original are left and right and that for the center.

Did they look better with transparency?




About the cannons i think they don't look pleasing if I shorten the barrel more as they are now, the proportions would'nt work then. Another option where to shorten the gratings a bit, but then they could look so narrow.

 

[modernknight1]

Erm, ok i forgot to include the Coat of Arms texture. It sits now on the ftp too. And a nice and relaxing vacation craiggo!

As to not make the 3rd post in a row edited this.

Her almost finished aft.

I like the images for the glass, but they would be much more at home on a Spanish galleon, not an English one. Elizabeth's father Henry VIII broke with Rome establishing the Church of England. Elizabeth was also a staunchly Protestant monarch. Henry went so far as to seize monastaries and church lands for the crown or awarding them to loyal vassals. During this time of seizure the Protestants destroyed many churches and defaced or destroyed any images associated with the Church of Rome. The new Protestant order over emphasized the biblical command that "thou shalt have no graven images".

It's extremely unfortunate that we lost so much beautiful and precious art during the Reformation.

The reason that I bring all this up is that you would never have seen any kind of religious art of this kind decorating an English ship after 1540.

Many historians have theorized that Elizabeth herself in an effort to harden the bonds of her subjects to herself, set herself up as the image of "the Virgin Queen" in order to substitute herself in a way for the previously venerated Virgin Mary, by a population that had only been converted to protestantism within the couple previous decades. A couple of popular symbols of this protestant virginity was the rose.

I would recommend decorating the windows with plain window glass, or slighly yellowed off color glass. If you choose a stained glass motif, Tudor roses would be appropriate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tudor_rose

As the local history mavin I thought I should bring this up. I do like the windows, just not on this ship.

MK

 

[morgan terror]

i can see the honeycomb pattern on your source material, but it's not nearly as small as you made it, though it does look better with transparency.

as for the guns, here's a nice example:

it seems to me that the guns should either be scaled down, or moved further onto the deck. but that would mean that the ropes would have to be remodeled a bit.

 

[nightwatcher]

Hi Morgan, i don't want to insult but the cannons on your first pic look almost toyish to me. Also they where good and skillful rebuilds but they seem to cry for children to play with them in a pirate themepark.... Only my two cent but i cant help me as to say they look toyish especially in this rebuild of an gundeck.

I found this about her used armament in the Battle of Flores. On MilitaryHistoryOnline you can read the folowing:
"On her last voyage Revenge seems to have been particularly heavily armed, with a total of 42 bronze guns. Twenty of these, heavy 20-30lb demi-cannon and slightly lighter culverins and demi-culverins, were housed on the lower deck. On the upper decks were more demi-culverins, 8-10lb sakers, and a variety of anti-personnel weapons, swivel-mounted breech-loaders, called fowlers or falcons."

On Demi-Culverin and Sakers, that. I would expect that they used landcannons with a special wagon for ships in the early times. As you read the Culverin and sakers where aprox. 3 meters long, the plans i use to rebuild her, the revenge, show, if measured, that the cannons are that length. The following picture shows my placed deck cannons ortographic to the plan, so we did'nt have perspective angles or thats like.

As you can see, i even used shorter versions for the deck armament. I for me think that the cannons are good as they are. They seem to be big for the deck but all information i can find shows that they are in the ok so.

Yeah, MK you where absolutely right about the churchly motives. What do you think about these?

 

[morgan terror]

the historical text might be fine and dandy, but i still see the logical problem of loading the things. if you'd roll the gun back as far as you could, right up to the lifeboat, the barrel would be more or less flush with the gunport. you can't stick a stamper in the thing like that unless you'd lean over the side. and you can't even do that with the lower guns. have you compared the size of your ship's cannons with those on other ship models yet?

 

[nightwatcher]

the historical text might be fine and dandy, but i still see the logical problem of loading the things. if you'd roll the gun back as far as you could, right up to the lifeboat, the barrel would be more or less flush with the gunport. you can't stick a stamper in the thing like that unless you'd lean over the side. and you can't even do that with the lower guns. have you compared the size of your ship's cannons with those on other ship models yet?

Yes i know what you mean about the stamper.
when i modeled the cannons i had the afore mentioned high poly ones, these with 2600 Tris, right at hand to control the models i made. They where minimal longer as mine. I can reimport them and then show you an comparison of them....

 

[morgan terror]

so the stock cannons are bigger? were those of the size you see on ships of a similar size though? or is the same cannon model used on all other ships? i was under the impression that they were of different size per ship class. it's wierd though. your cannon models are far more realistic, but they stick out so far from the hull. the stock gunmodel doesn't. i should go see master and commander again to see how they actually load those things. you could shove the stamper out through the gunport, i guess. but you would need at least some room.

i HAVE heard about gun crews turning the guns round by 90 degrees though. but that hardly seems practical. those pulleys are there simply because they're damn heavy, and those little wheels don't really allow for sharp turns.

 

[nightwatcher]

Only minimal. You would'nt see or notice it. I used the deck cannons of the "Golden Hind" model as a template, but they seem to be scaled down on that model, look almost like 4pd there.
You could also have flat planks over the grating for the battle... For the 24pd on the gundeck i can say that they are the correct size, the maindeck cannons i will revisit and play a bit with the scale, but that would be only minor changes as they are otherwise not high enough.

 

[morgan terror]

i still think they stick out wierdly far. i'm wondering about other people's comments on it.

 

[modernknight1]

Hi Nightwatcher,

Yes those windows are much nicer! Perfect

On the guns, I agree with Morgan on the practical aspect, but with you on the historical/visual evidence. Morgan has actually made me think quite differently about the Revenge's last battle now.

I actually have a passion for black powder guns. I bear the scars of both burns and explosions from actually handling them often during my life. Before I got into the simulations/IT and technology field/business, I was an Artillery officer in the US Army for a decade or so. I am not at home right now, or I would supply you with some excellent illustrations from a book of mine.

In the 16th century there were some really interesting experiments going on. Bronze guns were the tried and true naval gun and preferred by all Admirals of the time. However, the English were in somewhat of an arms race with the Dutch to produce the first dependable large caliber Iron guns. The English won that race, but export was forbidden because it was considered a closely held technological state secret. That didn't last very long. Unlike the 17th century where guns were pretty much standardized by the second/third decade of the century, crazy calibers were produced.

A 24 pounder culverin was the largest you would find in the 17th century, but in the 16th there were culverines produced from 30 to even 50 pounder size. That did not mean they were better. If anything, they were more prone to blowing up, took longer to reload and didn't fire their bigger balls as far as their smaller cousins or at near the velocity.

So the Revenge had 30 pound culverines. That equates to a barrel 10 to 12 feet long and even longer when you account for the carriage. I've attached this link. Scroll down to the section on 16th century smoothbore guns. Look at figure "a" to compare length with a regular gun, and then go down to the tables below to look at stats. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20483/20483-h/20483-h.htm#page005

So you know that the Revenge in her final hours was completely surrounded by 53 (yes that's right fifty-three) Spanish galleons in the Azores in a delaying suicide action to allow Howards fleet to escape. She held off the onslaught for hours until: "until all the powder of The Revenge, to the last barrell, was now spent, all her pikes broken, fortie of her best men slain, and the most part of the rest hurt". The ship itself was "marvellous unsaverie, filled with bloud and bodies of deade and wounded men like a slaughter house". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Grenville

So you see Morgan is absolutely correct about the awkward handling of the guns. English naval guns of the time were far better than Spanish. Spanish guns were largely imported and many had only two wheel carriages. English gunners of the time were known to be able to answer the Spanish three volleys to one. The Spanish were used to ramming and swabbing the gun tube from outside/over the gun-wale. So I think the English (based even on their manning and number of gunners) really only considered using one side of the ships guns at any given time. So most of her crew would be concentrated on the engaged side in a battle.

What did she do when surrounded? Did the crew on the starboard side have to wait for its opposite gun crew on the larboard side to load and run out their gun before they could fire theirs, so the recoil didn't knock the gun across from her off her wheels? Very interesting to think about and consider.

The Revenge was a masterpiece of her time. She was the highpoint in English technology and innovation all culminating in the largest of the Racebuilt galleon designs. I have no doubt that she possessed some monster guns/ordinance.

MK