I agree. According to Professor Boris Rankov, during the Olympias trials, they went through 1.7 tons of water per day for 170 rowers and 30 crew. This works out to 17 pounds of water per crew member. This is in line with the estimates of 2 gallons of water per rower per day, which is 16.68 pounds of water per rower (at 8.34 pounds per US liquid gallon). Add in food, and it’ll be 2 stone per rower per day.
Sailors, on the other hand, did get much less for drinking. I don’t have truly ancient numbers handy, but during the Armada campaign, Spanish sailors received 3 pints of water and 1 to 1 1/3 pints of wine (along with 1.5 to 2 pounds of bread and around half a pound of bacon, cheese, fish, rice, or beans), while English sailors received a gallon of beer a day (plus 4 ounces of cheese and 2 ounces of butter, plus either 2 pounds of beef, 1/4 of a stockfish, or 1 pound of bacon, plus either 1 pound of biscuit or 1 pint of peas). This is around 6.5 to 7 pounds of total rations for the Spanish, and around 11 pounds for the English. Based on that, I think 1 stone per sailor/officer/marine and 2 stone per rower/paddler will work out as a good enough round number.
Insufficient food/water will cause both a morale hit for all crew and a penalty on the speed table for rowers/paddlers.
Incidentally, bonuses/penalties on the speed table will probably also be how rowing ships handle crew quality (while sailing ships will have their maneuverability affected).
For what it’s worth (I haven’t read the full thread and it is possible that you already know this and have decided to do it differently), ACKS Core page 96 says that rowers need 3 gallons of water (3 stone) a day.
I had missed that, but it’s a change that I’m going to stick with for now. I’ll use rules from ACKS where they’re important and/or where I don’t have anything suggesting different numbers, but I’m willing to change it where there’s historical evidence or where I feel small tweaks need to be made (for example, I’m planning to adapt the wind chart from Core page 96 so that instead of multipliers, it will use bonus/penalty bumps, and damage can be mitigated by reefing).
The weight of rations will change things slightly, but galleys will still be very short-ranged strategically, dependent on shore support. The difference shows up with the heavier troop transport trireme (170 rowers, 16 sailors, 40 hoplites) - at 3 stone per rower, the transport will have excess capacity of 55 stone to equip 40 soldiers, when post-Iphicrates hoplites need 167 stone, and heavy hoplites need 287. At 2 stone per rower, the ship can devote 225 stone to equipping soldiers, which allows a blend of heavy hoplites, light hoplites, and missile troops (toxotai).
Please do. I would particularly appreciate any playtest results. My local wargaming group is in the middle of a US Civil War campaign, so I don’t have my usual playtesters for at least two or three months. Right now everything is based on data and math, which is good in theory but sometimes doesn’t work out so well on the table.
I do have some refined speed formulas, but they’re still in rough form. If you’re going to use the chart rules, here’s a slight refinement:
Burst Rowing still uses the morale rules, but counts as a 2 point bonus on the speed chart (i.e. a 2 becomes a 4, a 3 becomes a 4 and a 1, etc).
Light ships of a base type with a fractional movement get a +2 to that movement (so the 1/4 become 1/2, the 1/3 becomes 1). Light ships of a type with no fractional movement get an additional 1/3 movement. Heavy ships of a type with a fractional movement lose the fraction. Heavy ships of a type without a fractional movement reduce their movement by 1 and gain a 1/2 movement.
No major update today, but I did want to share my bibliography (so far), so that anyone who’s interested can look into the sources I’m using.
Books/articles I have read (either entirely or in sections):
Bass, George F. Beneath the Seven Seas: Adventures with the Institute of Nautical Archaeology.
Casson, Lionel. Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World.
Cotterell, Brian and Johan Kamminga. Mechanics of Pre-industrial Technology: An Introduction to the Mechanics of Ancient and Traditional Material Culture.
Higgins, David R. “Actium: End of the Roman Republic.” Strategy & Tactics 281 (pp. 50-60)
Lo, Jung-Pang. China’s Paddle-Wheel Boats: Mechanized Craft Used in The Opium War And Their Historical Background.
Morrison, J. S., J. F. Coates and N. B. Rankov. The Athenian Trireme: The History and Reconstruction of an Ancient Greek Warship.
Ronan, Colin A. The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5.
There are a few more books on my to-read list; I have William Murray’s The Age of Titans: The Rise and Fall of the Great Hellenistic Navies on my shelf, and there are two more books that I know a semi-local library has, but they’re out on loan.
A neat little package of Proficiencies for a “trained oarsman”, which has already come up in my naval PbP game. Endurance, Labour (oarsman) and Seasoned Voyager (which is an Adventuring analogue for experience at sea, making camps on beaches etc). That leaves a Normal Man who is a trained oarsman with one free General Proficiency slot for personalisation.
Some thoughts on areas I need to work on (both for people to see and for me to have a written reminder I can check up on):
I need to drop shp for ships in the next draft. I had missed the development post on structures (including ships) generally having 1 shp per ton. I had instead taken the core book values for galleys and fitted them to a formula curve based on tonnages I had for similar vessels. The formula was elegant, it worked within the limits of what was previously published…and it’s totally broken with larger ships. I tested it on Ptolemy’s “forty” mentioned above, and each hull would have had over 14,000 shp, which is just a wee smidgen higher than I want anything to have.
Tying into 1, I need to go back and recalculate tonnages. I was using numbers from the Actium article, but the more I read of experimental archaeology and more scholarly works, the less I like the numbers from the article. I like the light/normal/heavy, aphract/cataphract, and multi-bank/single-bank splits, but need to figure how those would affect the size of the ship. I’ve gotten decent information on how to figure the length and width of ships based on the number of rowers, so that will help.
I also need to figure how many soldiers can actually fit on a ship. I have some data points (Greek aphract triremes carried 14 marines, while cataphracts carried 40, and Roman cataphract quinqueremes carried 120).
Tying into 3, I need to figure how engines of war replace soldiers. Again, I have a data point that a Roman cataphract quinquerene with a specific artillery load carried only 40 marines instead of 120.
I need to finish up the sailing rules. Included in this will be small tweaks to the wind charts, which will affect sailing speed and potentially damage ships at high winds.
I want to change cargo capacities to stone, to make them mesh better with how weights are measured in ACKS. This should also make it easier to figure how much is left over after adding crew and equipment.
I want to add rules reflecting that war galleys typically didn’t carry masts in battle, and you really didn’t want to ram with a mast standing. This will involve rules for stepping or unstepping a mast, carrying an unstepped mast, and variants for the hemiolia/trihemiolia, which were much quicker to unstep the mast.
Speaking of ramming, I want to tweak it so that different ships do different ramming damage. A bireme/liburnian just isn’t going to do the same damage as an enneres/deceres. Also, rules for shearing oars need to be worked out. I have an idea for this, but haven’t fully worked it out yet.
I’m not totally happy with my speed chart. It works, but it’s more bookkeeping than I like.
The Dark - I’ll be very interested to see where your historical research leads you. The ACKS ship statistics were, partly, “legacy” statistics inherited from earlier iterations of D&D, so you might find that a deeper dive into history leads to needed corrections.
One area I spotted early on was how absurdly small the tonnages of cargo carried by B/X D&D ships were relative to their size. But the fact that those cargo sizes were so off suggests there might be other data flaws.
The best information I’ve found so far on cargo ships came from Lionel Casson’s dissertation, which was published by Yale. He used references from Greek and Roman sources to extrapolate information on merchant galleys. One of the vaguer ones is the lembas, which was a 50-oar galley that carried 25 tons of cargo.
However, far more detailed was the curcuros. This was a broad range of ships, which (according to source material) varied from around 9,000 to 18,000 artabs. From other sources, it is known that 40 artabs equal a modern ton (so these ships ranged from 225 to 450 tons burden, or around 375 to 750 tons displacement). It’s also known that a cubic cubit was considered to be 3 3/8 artabs, and that 10 cubic cubits is 1 cubic meter. Casson knew that merchant galleys had a beam:length ratio of about 6:1 (compared to 10:1 for war galleys), and that merchant galleys had their maximum beam for about 70% of their length, and that they had around a 2 meter depth of hold. Based on this, he estimated the size of a 750 displacement ton curcuros at 50 meters long and 7.7 meters maximum beam.
I’m still waiting for an opportunity to examine The Archaeology of the Roman Economy, which I am hoping will help further with developing non-warships. Honestly, though, the developments were so relatively minor from Greek to Medieval times (compared to the massive changes wrought by gunpowder and the need for gunports), that most sailing ships at this level of granularity have no distinguishing characteristics by era.
Also, there is a 10 that I forgot - ideas for nonhuman ships. This is partially done.
#1 (ship hull points) is done. #8 (ramming and shearing) is done (shearing can be a captain’s choice of attack or a random critical). #5 (sailing) is mostly done. #6 (using stone) is just a math change, and I have started recording things in stone rather than pounds or tons, using a 10 pounds to 1 stone ratio (or 200 stone to 1 ton when working with larger numbers). I think I will just live with #9 (the speed chart) unless I get some sudden spark of inspiration. It is mildly clunky on the bookkeeping side, but it works well enough as a unified mechanic that I don’t have a better replacement.
#2 (ship tonnages) I need to sit down and work math on; I was traveling for work last week, and didn’t have a chance to do any reading or number crunching. This goes likewise for #3 (number of marines that can comfortable fit on deck). #4 (siege engines on deck) may need to wait for D@W’s release, since I’ll want to utilize that information as best as possible.
#7 (masts) I will possibly get to this weekend. I’m still mulling over ideas.
#10 (ships for other races) has a tiny bit of work done so far. There’s a special piece of equipment for elves, and a type of ship for dwarves. Both are based on actual historical nautical things, but ones which I believe are unusual enough to work well for nonhumans.
I have a few questions for the peanut gall…I mean crowdsourcing participants.
Does anyone have any good fiction references for ships? I’m keeping a bibliographic list, and currently it’s entirely non-fiction - useful for research, but unbalanced. I’m aware of (though I haven’t read) the Aubrey/Maturin and Hornblower series, but there seems to be very little fiction predating the Age of Sail that focuses on naval travel or combat. I suppose I could include the first few novels of David Weber’s Safehold series, since up until Like A Mighty Army it’s heavily naval-based, with the technology being late Renaissance to Elizabethan up through A Mighty Fortress.
Are there any particular cultural parallels that people see with the nonhuman species (i.e. elves, dwarves, gnomes, Thalassians, orcs, goblins, etc) that would allow me to focus on making their ships a certain way? I already have ideas for dwarves, and I have a really nice reference work I want to incorporate into another species’ ship types (although I may have to really file off the serial numbers to avoid the appearance of Unfortunate Implications). However, if people say “oh, I see goblins as being similar to X,” then I can try to make their ships fit in with what X culture made.
Crew quality: As with armies, historical writings on navies focus on the captains and the admirals, but it is the quality of the crew that is vital, yet overlooked. Well-trained rowers are better able to maintain their rhythm and are more efficient with their stroke. Well-trained sailors can read the wind and adjust sails to better take advantage of the varying zephyrs.
Green crew: A green crew can be gathered anywhere, whether it’s on a coast or not. These can be bored farmboys, down-on-their-luck mercenaries, or just people too drunk to avoid the press gang. These are the same sort of folks that become spear-carriers in armies, and are paid 3 gp per month. Ships with green crews suffer a 1 point penalty to initiative, morale, and turn rate. Green crew members have the same availability as light infantry in any city.
Average crew: An average crew is made up of people who are familiar with living on water. They include fishermen and ferrymen, as well as formerly green crew that have survived a voyage or two. They are competent to run a ship with minimal oversight. They are paid 6 gp per month, and a ship with an average crew has no modifier to its stats. Average crew have the same availability as light infantry in coastal cities or heavy infantry in inland cities.
Veteran crew: A veteran crew has been on the water their entire life or been heavily trained for their job. They’ve often served on multiple ship types, or at least multiple ships, and have either sailed widely across the known world or served in at least one military campaign. Veteran crew are paid 9 gp per month, and a ship with a veteran crew gets a 1 point bonus to initiative, morale, and turn rate. Veteran crew members have the same availability as medium cavalry in coastal cities and heavy cavalry in inland cities.
Elite crew: An elite crew cannot be hired. This is a veteran crew that has served on a particular ship for at least six months and in at least one battle. An elite crew, like a veteran crew, is paid 9 gp per month, and gets an additional 1 point bonus to morale.
Hiring and improving a crew: A crew hired on to a ship has the same rating as the majority of its members, and is paid accordingly. Thus, a sailing ship that hires 4 green, 2 average, and 3 veteran crew is considered to have a green crew, and pays them accordingly (and suffers the penalties for a green crew). A green crew becomes average after one month of active travel (time in port does not count). An average crew becomes veteran after three months of active travel, and a veteran crew becomes elite after another six months of active travel.
Replacing crew: As long as at least 50% of the crew remains intact, the crew’s rating does not change. If less than half the original crew constitutes the new crew, treat it as a new hiring, counting the existing crew as their current rating. If a ship with 5 surviving Veteran crew hires 6 Green crew, 3 Average crew, and 2 Veteran crew, it now has 6 Green crew, 3 Average crew, and 7 Veteran crew, and still counts as a Veteran crew.
Traditionally sailors were paid more than oarsmen. Indeed oarsmen were paid different amounts depending on where they sat - those at the bottom were paid the least.
I had an exchange, ironically, with Christian Cameron on his fora about ships. Apparently as far as ancient naval vessels go, research is really rather thin, and what we have is quite old (predating the reconstruction of the Olympias, for example).
Yes, I’ve been running into that. Quite a bit of what I’ve been reading are the books that were written by the Olympias builders as they were working on the ship. I also found a copy of Lionel Casson’s “Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World,” which is amazing (although very mildly outdated by newer research). My other major source so far for ancient ships is William Murray’s new book, “The Age of Titans,” which was published in 2012.
I’m looking a bit further forward, also, since I have Osprey books on the Tudor navy of Henry and Elizabeth, and the local libraries have extremely good works on the Grande y Felicísima Armada by people who dove the wrecks for archaeology. The books I’ve currently been unable to find are the ones by G. R. G. Worcester on Chinese ships (Junks and Sampans of the Upper Yangtze, Junks and Sampans of the Yangtze, and Chinese War-Junk).
I did find a Vietnam War-era American assessment of Vietnamese sampans, which I’m slowly reading through, since many of them were still built in traditional fashions.
I’ve also read a bit on Arab-Indian ships, but technical detail has so far been lacking.
If you’re willing to go as far forward as the Tudor navy, there’s a book on the Venetian shipyards: “The art and archaeology of Venetian ships and boats”, 2001.