WOIN OLD Ship Battles at Sea

I am running WOIN OLD with a couple of groups. One of the games involved ships at sea battling each other. I used the canon stats from the Wilderness and Strongholds book. I tried using the starship combat system from NEW Space book. However, categorizing the ships was difficult to determine how many actions. I would presume the application would be similar for ships at sea. Just on a lighter scale than a starship. I think that this idea in a EONS magazine would be a good idea to visit and offer additional guidance for ship battles at sea. WOIN OLD does have pirate and sailor careers after all. Any help or ideas that you can provide in relation to this is appreciated.

That's an interesting idea. Yes, I think the starship rules might work, with some changes. Movement would be different, and you wouldn't have computers and sensors. The ship classes - as you say - would need restructuring. I'm not personally very familiar with medieval ship sizes, so it would need some research on tonnage and the like.

So looking at Wikipedia, the largest ship in the world is the Pioneering Spirit crane vessel at about 400K tons.

The Batillus class supertankers are next at about 2.8K tons.

Largest cruise ship is Oasis Class vessel Allure of the Seas at 2.25K tons.

The largest container ship in the world is the MSC Oscar at just under 200K tons.

The largest military ship is a Nimitz aircraft carrier at 100K tons.

Those are the largest modern sizes, which is probably as large as the system would want to get. Medieval ships would be considerably smaller, of course.

A medieval galleon, by comparison, was 1000-2000 tons, so a thousandth the weight of a modern aircraft carrier. The largest was apparently the Padre Eternal, a Portuguese galleon from 1663 at 2000 tons.

This page looks useful:

http://www.thepirateking.com/ships/ship_types.htm

Clipper 1000 tons
Cog 100-200 tons
Corvette 400-600 tons
Frigate 1600 tons
Galleon 1000-2000 tons

Just to give an idea of what sizes we'd be looking at for medieval ships. So we'd be looking at a 0-2000 ton range in total for medieval ships and 0-400K tons for modern ships.

For modern ships, that pretty much works as-is with the AL9 hull classes (they go up to 500K). No need to change anything there.

For medieval ships, looks like we'd be dividing by 250(!) So a Class X medieval ship would be 560-640 tons instead of 140K-160K tons.

That makes a the Padre Eternal, the largest galleon in the world in the 1600s, at 2000 tons, a Class XVIII ship; and a 100-ton cog would be a Class III ship.

I would very much like a supplement for this.

I just made an account to necro this post, because I feel this is something I could actually contribute meaningfully to.

I've dabbled with ideas for how to do reasonable tall ship combat (modern ships are much easier to deal with), and the most difficult thing is dealing with the wind. Something small like a sloop can sail much closer to the wind than something large like a ship of the line. The best idea I came up with something similar to the turning radius mechanics in N.E.W. (full disclosure, I picked up the N.E.W. rules three days ago, and haven't had the opportunity to actually play any of it), but with some corrections for how close to the wind your ship is sailing. You could add a size-dependent Move action to change tack (not a major maneuver for a sloop, but would take probably the whole turn for a large ship). I haven't tried laying this out on a hex grid, so I'm not sure how easy it would be to implement.