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Having read and loved the series some 15 years ago, I want to thank this thread for reminding me of it..... that I've forgotten the bits sufficiently so re-reading it is (insert some bawdy O'Brian analogy for a virgin's wedding night) JUST LIKE THE FIRST TIME!
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Aug 13, 2019 16:34
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Rereading it... ... Is like being the captain of Surprise for the first time. 
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Aug 16, 2019 07:30
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Yes, yes. I suppose it is akin to having a birthday party and your beloved wife pops naked out of the cake yelling "Surprise!" Not like you haven't seen it all before, and yet.... ..... Haha! Dye smoke my witticism then? Hahaha!
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Aug 16, 2019 18:51
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https://twitter.com/scottlynch78/status/1166435450762014720
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Aug 27, 2019 20:55
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Which this thread title makes us all look like a pack of God-damned lubbers  You don't hoist the mainsail, you let fall the mainsail.
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Sep 1, 2019 04:33
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Yet we run them up the yard arm. 
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Sep 1, 2019 20:52
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Let’s all splice the mainbrace instead
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Sep 2, 2019 04:51
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Puddings, my dear sir? Puddings. We trice 'em athwart the starboard gumbrils, when sailing by and large.
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Sep 2, 2019 13:00
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Almost done with the series again, and I have to say I honestly prefer the books where they're sailing on a ship other than the Surprise. Reason being that she's essentially a third main character in the story and you know that whatever happens, she isn't going to sink or get irrevocably harmed, whereas if it's the Polychrest or the Diane or the horrible old Leopard, anything can happen.ovenboy posted:Puddings, my dear sir? Puddings. We trice 'em athwart the starboard gumbrils, when sailing by and large. I feel practiced upon 
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Sep 6, 2019 23:56
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the vile
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Sep 7, 2019 04:58
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In honor to the thread, drat my left wrist, break out the violin !
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Sep 7, 2019 05:09
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Polychrest was based on the real live HMS Arrow which had an unremarkable career and whose officers did not complain of poor sailing qualities.
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Sep 7, 2019 11:58
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In a series that's all about clever tiny throwaway lines, one that stuck with me on this re-read is when they meet up with a fleet and the flagship hoists signals and somebody (probably Tom Pullings) reads it out as "Report aboard flag captain and P-H-I-Z...the signals mid cannot spell."
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Sep 8, 2019 14:56
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Not only is that an atrocious joke but that's Jon Bois, author of Tim Tebow's CFL Chronicles and 17776. I once spent an entire morning laughing about something in Tebow, and if you haven't read the latter, go do that now please. Not kidding. I just finished The Yellow Admiral and I still think Jack's most endearing quality is his habit of laughing a bit too long at his own jokes. And it's a real joy seeing Stephen and Diana actually getting along for once. (Yes, I know what's coming, sadly.) How can there only be two more books?
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Sep 14, 2019 09:42
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Largely inspired by these books, I have been working on a frigate simulator. I just released a build: https://thapen.itch.io/painted-ocean It's fairly bare-bones, and I don't guarantee its realism, but it does give an idea how these ships function. You can maneuver in the wind; there is weather and terrain for the world for a year; there is time acceleration, if you want to sail across the Atlantic; and you can set up frigate actions. If you want to lose your foremast and shoot up into the wind, now you can.
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Oct 2, 2019 08:30
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Needs a Kickstarter. 
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Oct 2, 2019 22:18
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PhantomOfTheCopier posted:Needs a Kickstarter. Well, probably not. I had more ambitious plans at one point, but now I mostly want to wrap this up.
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Oct 3, 2019 22:34
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I did some physics modeling of sailing as well some years ago but mostly used it to generate three days or so (game time) of ship's logs. Then I'd sit down for 45min and do all the dead reckoning and sight reductions and plot the courses. I figured it was the type of "game" that no one would play, lack of flashy graphics and all, so I've never posted it anywhere online.
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Oct 4, 2019 02:32
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I need to get back into the series. I finished The Surgeon's Mate several months ago and need to start up The Ionian Mission before I start forgetting stuff. Yesterday I re-read some of the essays in A Sea of Words, and the one on medical theory and practice of the time is really interesting. Outside of surgeries like amputations, general medical practice was ineffective, except by accident like when surgeons prescribed cinchona for malaria, which contained quinine unbeknownst to them. But the prevailing idea was that a surgeon's job was to help the body's natural recovery mechanisms run smoothly so it seems like most surgeons were under no illusions about their abilities. The essay even opens with a quote from Maturin lamenting that he could do very little with medicine or surgery. The essay goes into the "solidist" theory of medicine that was popular at the time, where the body's various ills were due to imbalances in the nerves, vessels, and arteries. Bleeding would have been a popular method to fight fevers under solidist theory because draining blood was assumed to reduce the friction caused by blood running through the arteries, and that friction was assumed to be the cause of high body temperature during a fever. Pretty wild.
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Oct 4, 2019 17:22
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I've started a long-delayed re-read, and I have the impression that for a series just brimming with jargon, M&C uses some that I don't think is common in most of the novels, like t'garns'l instead of t'gallant sail/topgallant sails, but it has been years since I finished the last novel so my memory may be failing. There's been a few other terms but now I can't find them. I get stuck on stuff, and something that's been messing with my brain is the commands for turning the ship's wheel vs how the ship actually turns. I thought the commands for steering a ship at this time period, like "port your helm", "hard to port", are Tiller oriented, not Rudder oriented, and the wheel turns one way the tiller points to the opposite, the rudder goes the same way as the wheel. Meaning for those examples: you are turning the wheel to starboard -> the tiller is going to port -> rudder turns to starboard -> ship turns starboard. On an ebook edition, but page 10 when talking about the Sophie's previous captain "invariably tacked by suddenly putting his helm hard -a - lee": My brain: Wheel turns to windward -> tiller goes to lee -> Rudder turns to windward -> ship turns and tacks through wind. Later page 134, during convoy duty the Sophie has "come up into the wind" for gunnery practice, and it's noticed one of the convoy is being boarded, Jack shouts " 'Port your helm.' ... the Sophie paid off. Now the wind was on her port beam: a few moments later she was right before it, and in still another moment she steadied on her course, with the wind three points on her starboard quarter." : My brain: Ship pointing into the wind, wheel is turned to starboard -> tiller points to port -> rudder goes to starboard -> ship turns to starboard, with wind now on the port side, and continues turning. Usually easy to look this stuff up, but the animation accompanying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship%27s_wheel#Mechanism looks to me like the front view is correct and the overhead view is wrong and it has short-circuited my brain. The text supports how I thought it worked. Am I right or have I made a conceptual blunder?
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Oct 7, 2019 22:36
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that animation looks consistent for front elevation vs overhead. wheel turns left, tiller goes right so rudder (and ship) go left. then vice versa.
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Oct 8, 2019 05:51
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No, I think PlushCow has a really good eye and the overhead view is wrong. (e: or else now I have the brain sickness too.) The wheel is going right and the tiller goes right. Coincidentally, I was just reading in Cochrane: the Real Master and Commander, that the Speedy had a hand tiller, not a wheel -- in contradiction to Cochrane's own autobiography. You can see it in Geoff Hunt's painting of the Speedy, too:  (Sophie is definitely written as having a wheel though.) Sax Solo fucked around with this message at 11:49 on Oct 8, 2019 |
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Oct 8, 2019 11:45
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Note that this question is discussed on the talk page for that Wikipedia entry. I think it's just a case of an overhead view of a spinning wheel being ambiguous, a la https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_Dancer Buuuut my first thought was, If I cross the lines coming off the wheel it will reverse. I've seen such a thing but haven't found a good picture. This was my first reaction because I thought it was backwards, so Jack's instructions to "port your helm" would have the indicated effect. My memory from last reading is that I gave up, never convinced that "X your helm" had the same direction as "hard to X". This may be discussed in some of the provisional books but I haven't had a chance to look. If a sailor typically pushed left (on a tiller) to go right, it may have been more natural to wheel counter-clockwise to go right. Also nothing requires consistency, and we would hope the captain and master would know the ship, automatically in fact.
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Oct 8, 2019 22:59
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My brain just shorthand’s all that stuff as “the ship did a thing”
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Oct 9, 2019 04:56
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yaffle posted:My brain just shorthand’s all that stuff as “the ship did a thing” Same, really. I sometimes feel like a real dummy because I still can't grasp even the basics of how wind and sails interact – I've seen the diagrams and everything, but may brain says "wind from behind, go forward fast, wind from ahead, going nowhere". But then of course the wind pushes the waves as well, and... Well, let's say I would have failed the midshipman's examination.
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Oct 9, 2019 09:20
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Each time I re-read I get a slightly better idea of what the ship words mean. Then on the next re-read I have that heightened understanding and the books are new again. It makes each read-through a new experience.
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Oct 9, 2019 12:32
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PhantomOfTheCopier posted:Note that this question is discussed on the talk page for that Wikipedia entry. I think it's just a case of an overhead view of a spinning wheel being ambiguous, a la https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_Dancer Well unfortunately not everyone is right on the internet. I don't think it's ambiguous -- tricky and difficult but not ambiguous. However! Even if we ignore the wheel movement, the tiller/rudder is moving wrong because the image is supposed to be synchronized, but it's not. To see it.. I'll add port and starboard labels to the two views. I pray I do not gently caress it up:  Now look at the movement of the two tillers. They are going (right left right left) in sync together on your screen, right? But that means they're not going (port starboard port starboard) together in those views. Therefore, wiki gif is wrong.
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Oct 9, 2019 13:30
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Affirmative. They made the wrong choice using a front view. (Rotate above then 180deg, versus just rotate above). Time to update the talk page. Well compared to some of the above readers, I like to understand the movement of the ships and the battles. There are a few that are quite wrong in the texts, though I admit to forgetting which ones I gave up trying to understand. I probably still have the analyses somewhere.
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Oct 9, 2019 16:25
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yaffle posted:My brain just shorthand’s all that stuff as “the ship did a thing” Same, I only half-heartedly try to smoke his meaning. I do appreciate that the big, bluff Jack plays chamber music (and bought an Amati, the bastard?) because it somehow ties in with the fact a superior captain has an almost intimate affair with the breezes, winds, gales- the profligate! He's part murder ship driver and part autistic bus driver. And absolute tyrant on his own ship. It's mental how O'Brian was able to conjure this personality up.
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Oct 9, 2019 16:43
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Not only does he play, but he plays much more skillfully than Stephen. He's also an accomplished mathematician and astronomer who has presented papers before the Royal Society. He's very much a multifaceted character.
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Oct 9, 2019 17:00
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The genius of characters like Jack and Stephen is they don't have 20th century morals and attitudes transported back into the Napoleonic era. They very much think and behave in ways appropriate to their class and time period.
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Oct 9, 2019 18:41
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Fire Safety Doug posted:Same, really. I sometimes feel like a real dummy because I still can't grasp even the basics of how wind and sails interact – I've seen the diagrams and everything, but may brain says "wind from behind, go forward fast, wind from ahead, going nowhere". But then of course the wind pushes the waves as well, and... Well, let's say I would have failed the midshipman's examination. I have the same problem, I've read explanations about how the physics works but the only time I've been on a sailing vessel was with a small Bermuda-rigged (see, Wikipedia has taught me that much at least) boat, and I was a kid at the time and barely remember it anyway. The Painted Ocean program that Pishtaco made and posted further up the thread is really cool and is actually more helpful than reading, I think. I just tried it out and managed to get out of the harbor (after starting out by going backwards and almost running aground like a God-damned lubber  ). If you set all the sails to "trim" then they'll automatically adjust for optimum performance and that's helpful to see. I haven't tried sailing into the wind yet though, or tacking.Thank you Pishtaco for publishing that!
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Oct 9, 2019 18:51
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Thanks! My sailing experience is about the same. I'd be happy to hear about any tweaks that could make things more realistic.
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Oct 9, 2019 22:50
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I have absolutely nothing to offer in terms of knowledge for making it more realistic, hah. I think I'll give it another go and see if I can tack, and then maybe I'll try to slope away (to use the proper nautical term) towards the Americas.
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Oct 9, 2019 22:57
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Pishtaco posted:Largely inspired by these books, I have been working on a frigate simulator. This is really seriously cool and 45 minutes with it made me understand some stuff I'd never really understood like using the spanker/headsails to turn the ship. How far up into the wind will the ship in the harbor scenario sail? And what's the best set of sails to get it to do that? I did kind of successfully tack once, ans got up to 8 knots with most everything set and the wind on the quarter. Jack talks about overpressing ships with sail and pushing down their head etc-does this account for this or is more sail mostly = faster? Very impressive bit of work.
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Oct 10, 2019 00:46
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:This is really seriously cool and 45 minutes with it made me understand some stuff I'd never really understood like using the spanker/headsails to turn the ship. How far up into the wind will the ship in the harbor scenario sail? And what's the best set of sails to get it to do that? I did kind of successfully tack once, ans got up to 8 knots with most everything set and the wind on the quarter. Jack talks about overpressing ships with sail and pushing down their head etc-does this account for this or is more sail mostly = faster? Very impressive bit of work. I think that for maneuvering round the harbour in real life you would not want too many sails set, as it's a pain to physically move them around quickly and, if the courses are set, you can't see where you're going (and the harbour is full of shallow water - you would probably warp around, placing an anchor with the boat and pulling yourself towards it, rather than sail). Similarly for tacking. In the game, this is less of an issue. Since you are sailing on the wind, you want the sails reasonably balanced fore and aft, so that you are not getting pushed away from or towards the wind. Let's say topsails, topgallants, spanker and two of the jibs. (Although as it is tuned at the moment, the spanker may unbalance it - I'm not sure). Then to tack you haul in the spanker and ease off the headsails to help you come up into the wind; you order the crew to stop trimming the fore sails (by ordering it braced up); then once you are pointing towards the wind the foretopsail is naturally backed, and you are back in the situation in the tutorial to turn away from the wind onto the other tack. I don't really understand pushing down the head. I *think* it is to do with yaw stability. If the hydrodynamic sideways forces on the hull are in front of the centre of mass (as they generally are), then the ship is unstable and hard to steer. Presumably pushing the front of the ship down moves these forces forwards even more. It is not clear to me whether this is a real thing. My main source book is essentially a compilation of 19th century sailing manuals, and their physics tended to be sketchy. A similar issue is that if you are going before the wind, you would not want to have much (or any) after sail set, because aerodynamic side forces acting behind the centre of mass will similarly make you unstable. Anyway, I have tried to tune things so you sometimes go faster with less sail, but I never noticed this as a large effect.
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Oct 10, 2019 07:23
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I am not a sailor. I always read head forward as being a combination of excessive sail and higher wind waves. Presumably more wind pushing against the extra sails allows you to angle things forward, at the expense of straining the masts and supporters. Note that extra wind almost always means greater waves, however, and though we're not talking constant 20m towers (oh the Waakzaamheid) remember there are multiple times O'Brian refers to the ship rising and diving into the troughs. Consider how much steerage and control you'd have if the poor boat was pointing its nose up in the air. If the wind is on the beam or quarter, every time the nose goes up the head is going to spin to leeward. Also, and this may be comparably minimal, part of the rudder will be less in the water (at least hydrodynamically). If you're riding to the top of a wave, for instance, you're stuck with linear and angular momentum and the forces of the wind until you crash down the other side. If you keep the head in the water, you can minimize all those lateral forces and keep the water flowing past the rudder. Well being interested in physics, that's what I always thought. With computing power these days I'd want to do a rather complete simulation on a ship to get the hydrodynamic elements, and then use those in the game to achieve realism without needing a full-time physics engine, but shrug talk-versus-do and it's not on my list right now. But yeah this may be a simple matter of scale. Think about the loaded weight of the vessels and the "light storm" conditions in an ocean. Also think about the tender and how much they describe that cutter as being a good sailer. (And then lament the Polychrest)
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Oct 10, 2019 08:08
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Came across a fun video on espionage and the use of ciphers in the 1770s https://youtu.be/FVpkrRKphcU
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Oct 10, 2019 12:28
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PerilPastry posted:Came across a fun video on espionage and the use of ciphers in the 1770s im p sure Townsend's has made a boiled baby too if you dig through their archives
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Oct 10, 2019 17:28
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Continuing on my re-read of the first novel, there was a line I really liked after Stephen directs Jack where some fresh water may be had off the coast of Spain, and was allowed to stay ashore for a night to visit a "friend" (really just wanted some solitude from the human press of ship life), and subsequently they had to leave Stephen stranded for days, and Jack is worried. There's a passage where Jack is thinking to himself that the ship needed at least two more midshipmen – an oldster and a youngster – if someone before the mast would do to be raised – someone with experience than a youth with money – etc etc and his thoughts are broken with with an elips "...If the Spainards caught Stephen Maturin they would shoot him for a spy." That concern that breaks through his thoughts for his friend worked really well for me. A more humorous part I enjoyed was after a good great gun exercise that Jack tells Stephen about when they are in the captain's cabin afterwards, and Stephen is less than interested: "I am happy you are pleased; and certainly the mariners seemed to ply their pieces with a wonderful dexterity; but you must allow me to inist that that note is not A." "Ain't it?" cried Jack anxiously. "Is this better?" Ha ha! PlushCow fucked around with this message at 23:00 on Oct 11, 2019 |
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Oct 11, 2019 22:53
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