Challenge Warship

[Buffy Airwood]

Ive had a old replica picture of a painting in a room in my house for quite sometime. It says it first sailed in 1753 and was last sailed by a William H Webb about a hundred years later. The class of ship it was designated as was Challenge War Frigate. The basic stats on it were a 3 gundeck ship with 2 in the front and 2 in the rear. The gundecks were 24x 12lbs topdeck, 28x 18lbs mid-deck, and 32x on the bottom gundeck. Obviously this is not the early version of the ship, but what little information I could find about it was not very clear about the size of the ship.

My thinking is since they are doing away with 1st and 2nd rates is to introduce a ship that would be a refit possibly of a valiant, or even a wenden making sure that it is not a copy paste of the treason currently out. This would help out with those wanting more powerful ships without being limited to 4th rates and 3rd rates. I personally would love a ship with 4 decks of guns, even if that meant it was still rated as a 3rd rate with say 8 guns per deck or something.

Hope this thought is a good one, and please build off of it if you would like to, or take it a step back even. I just want to get some feedback going so the devs notice and take notes on what we might want later on down the road.

[JW Santhem]

Theyr doing away 1st and 2nd rates becourse they are too powerfull.
Introducing a 3th rate thats as powerfull as a 2nd, or 1st, but still calling it a 3th isnt going to solve that problem.

About your ship:

24x12
28x18
32x ?

This would mean it was a 84 gunner, which makes it (by 1720 standards) a 2nd rate.
The standard for rated ships was getting higher and higher over time, and as your ship was build in 1753, it might have been a 3th rate by then.


With the current User Content Policy its basically impossible to get a 50+ gunner in-game, if your project isnt already started. So what you could do is look for plans for a 4 decked ship with a a maximum of 12 guns per deck . Then model it.

My guess is that there arent many of them, but you can always try, if you want one really bad

[Julian Northage]

Well even by the 19th century, sweeduish 1st rates were about 20-30 guns behind thier european counterparts so I see no reasons to object. The Sweedes were far behind.

[Buffy Airwood]

Well, Treason is a Wenden refit for us bucs and my thought was to see if a 3rd rate for everyone would be somewhat viable. I see now that thought was in vain and think maybe take more of a Valiant refit approach sorta, or maybe introduce official 5th rates that are actually named 5th rate?

If 5th rates would be introduced as named 5th rates what would their gundecks be like. I doubt very much they would be triple gundecks like we have in the 3rd and 4th rates currently. So, maybe give them two gundecks with more and heavier guns than the best lvl 50 ships currently out there that are not rated ships?

I really should make a new thread for this if I want to elaborate on this more. But, in short how would this sound for a possible start for naming a 5th rate, or start a 5th rate series that would be a refit of something in the game like a standard Hercules or maybe a Dauntless and just tone down the number of guns to say 4 to 6 extra total for broadsides. Just thinkin out loud though, lemme know and maybe start a new thread with this idea since the original one wasnt really a good one it would seem.

Swivel:
4x 1/2Lbs
Fore:
2x 12Lbs
Aft:
2x 18Lbs
Broadsides:
24x 11Lbs (12 per side)
32x 22Lbs (16 per side)

My thinking is more for the cutts since all rated captured ships are PvP flagged for them, and as a buc i want more options too.

[elessaria]

Sadly, the ship is:

(A) Over the max gun count for new submissions,

(B) Outside the date range for the game,

(C) A picture and not proper draught plan to work from.


These things make it extremely unlikely to receive FLS blessing fro inclusion in the game.

[LiMuBei]

Yeah, plans or it's highly unlikely to happen. Because: a) it's super hard to model an accurate ship without plans b) it's almost impossible to judge if the ship would be appropriate for the time frame.

Preferrably one can dig up plans for the ship in question or someone would be willing to learn how to draw ship drafts and then create it themselves

[Buffy Airwood]

I see what your saying, but at the same time id like to see them actually name a class of 5th rates. And if it is to be a 5th rate (big IF) then it needs to have more guns than said best lvl 50 non-rated ships, but not nearly as many as a rated 4th rate or other rated ship. Perhaps it has too many guns, but at the same time if I went with similar count guns only heavier we would still be having this tug of war. At this point in time I am not after any FLS blessing. I am after what is feasable to do and then proceed to make plans and the rest and hope to get FLS's support. Right now this is just a "is it feasable" stage. Because to do all the work and then be told in the end its too much is not something anyone wants to hear.

So, for now I guess I can move on to another phase of the project that is easy to do. Think out a ship that is not a 4th rate, is better than any non-rated ship, and hope FLS goes with the idea (the community too, thats us) of having actual 5th rates in the game. Perhaps make them a refit of one of the better ships in the game, perhaps the Dauntless or Archelon.

[RacecarRay]

5th rate = frigate. In this time period, 40-44 guns.

We have them in game already.

[KrisWood]

Can you post a photo of this painting? We can get a much better idea from that if the design is one based on older designs or if it was one of the more modern designs of the era. The period between 1740 and 1760 was one of the most rapid transitions in british naval history. It's quite possible it could be based on something older. Most likely it's based on either the Unicorn or the Royal Caroline, and thus probably too far out of period to be useful. We could at least find something similar though.

Is this it? If so it's one of the post-Napoleanic era frigates, far too modern. It's got more in common with USS Constitution than with the ships of the PotBS era:

http://www.nmm.ac.uk/server/show/conMediaFile.15975

More info on her here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Challenger_(1858)

She has a lot in common with the Unicorn of 1824, currently docked in Dundee, Scotland:

http://www.frigateunicorn.org/