Waldemar

All this does not mean that quadrant curves could not be used for the bow section at all. They could, and even quite successfully, but only on condition that the bows were very blunt, and the greatest width of the hull was very close to the stem. In practice, for large capital ships and merchantmen. And probably rather by less experienced draughtsmen. Below is an example of such a form of French origin from the late 17th century (from the monograph by Jean Boudriot, Le vaisseaux trois-ponts du chevalier de Tourville 1680) with curves of both types drawn in it. For self-assessment... (it is important to bear in mind that this plan is quite heavily distorted, and I have only made partial corrections). Rather the end, I've already done quite a lot of work on it anyway.

Now we have finally arrived at the plans of Le Jazon 1724, which could probably best be used to recreate the shape of La Néréïde's hull. As can be seen below, the logarithmic curve only partly coincides with the original line, but it must also be added that the French designers were known for their so-called tâtonnement, i.e. modifying the lines manually in various ways. And even despite the lack of complete correspondence with the original curve, even the unmodified logarithmic curve still gives much better results than the quadrant curve.

🙂 Thanks. Yeah, I had a meeting with these curves too in Sutherland's The Ship-builders Assistant, 1711. By the way, almost made the frames of my reconstructed ship with variable radius, as he proposes, but finally decided that the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries would be too early for such development. Before checking the French draughts I have also verified a few early plans of the 'British' origin and found their creators 'cheated' in a sense that they fabricated somewhat pragmatically this bow curve from two or more arcs, not necessarily perfectly tangent. Be that as it may, while this way of doing things was quite acceptable in graphic methods, it was entirely not practical in non-graphic methods, and I had to reject them. In this draught of the English origin of about 1625 (from the Rigsarkivet, Copenhagen), I have also drawn in blue a quadrant type curve. As can be seen, it is completely out of place. Below is a plan of the Danish ship Argo 1599 (Rigsarkivet, Copenhagen), designed by Scotsman David Balfour.

This is not quite my intention to enter the dispute on this now. I will just stand by my opinion. But back to the curve of the greatest breadth at the bow. It is needed especially while trying to reconstruct the hull shape from scratch, and I started the search for a type of curve as employed by contemporary shipbuilders. Its geometrical construction had to be simple, easily adaptable to the non-graphical methods of hull shaping, had to connect the hull station at the ship's greatest breadth with the stem, and to provide a wide range of possible shapes, from very sharp to very full. In short, rather long search in period works for adequate type of such a curve failed, until help came from one of the excellent works on period naval architecture by Jean Boudriot – La conception des vaisseaux royaux sous l'Ancien Régime, Neptunia 169. The described method (shown at C above) of creating logarithmic curve seemed feasible, and after its adaptation for my purposes, already first comparisons with period ship plans gave desired results. The first to be checked were draughts made by professional shipbuilder from 'my' period, Portuguese Manuel Fernandes (from his Livro das Traças de Carpintaria, 1616).

Preparing graphics takes time, please give me some of it. Yes, I have both works in my home library and that's why I haven't listed them above. The Album de Colbert has nothing to do with the concept of ship design, and Dassié's work is very poor in that respect. I have included scans of two plates regarding this issue from his book. There are quite a few oddities in his work and this one is also quite disappointing. I would rather never choose to try to recreate the hull shape basing on Dassié's description.

Well, in most cases probably yes, depending on the method and assuming we mean early modern area. Simplifying a bit – there were then many methods of deriving hull shapes. They could be graphical or non-graphical (ie. no scale plans were necessary), the ships could be formed and built by shell methods, frame-led methods or skeleton methods. In these methods all, some or no actual frames were pre-designed (i.e. formed before their assembly in the hull structure). And all kind of intermediary ways... There was a very widespread method, in which main frame profile was offset and slightly rotated almost as one entity to get the shape of other frames. This way the rest of the frames could be formed on the shipyard ground before their insertion into the constructed hull. But this was only possible to some point, limited by those two 'quarter' frames. Beyond these 'quarter' frames the hull ends were then usually shaped by using flexible battens. In the early variants of the more flexible 'hauling up/down futtocks' method (in which the main frame shape was divided into several 'independent' geometrical parts) the 'quarter' frames were still being retained, but they were already not really necessary, as in this method pre-designed frames could be usually formed till the very ends of the hull. Those three crucial frames could be also employed in the frame-led method, and nothing more except flexible lengthwise battens. In a slightly later, already fully graphical methods employing geometrical 'battens', these two 'quarter' frames could be dispensed with at all. In the shell methods, these two 'quarter' frames could be equally superfluous. Yet, it is best to consult the sources. For the 16th and 17th centuries I would recommend the following works: – Fernando Oliveira, Livro da fabrica das naos, ca. 1570–1580 – English so-called „Newton” manuscript of ca. 1600 – Manuel Fernandes, Livro das Traças de Carpintaria, 1616 – English anon. manuscript of ca. 1620 – Spanish government ordonances (dimension establishments) of 1607, 1613 and 1618 – Georges Fournier, Hydrographie, 1643 – Bushnell Edmund, The Compleat Ship-Wright, 1664 – Anthony Deane, Naval Architecture, 1670 Alternatively, or additionally, the excellent modern works on the period naval architecture by such expert authors like Jean Boudriot, Éric Rieth, Richard Barker, Filipe Vieira de Castro, Alan Lemmers.

Voilà, I sent you by PM copies of my publications on the Swedish ship division from Götheborg, which included Papegojan. But honestly, I don't think you'll get much practical use out of them either (although you'll find a lot of tables and graphics in them, especially on the Swedish artillery), because the information about Papegojan is also very scattered there, and they are written in Polish. However, these publications may be good just to enrich your private collection related to your model. If that is not enough, below are most data on Papegojan already filtered: 1623 built in the Netherlands and sold, 1624 transferred to Sweden, 1644 sunk in battle. Armament: 1625 (requirement, not actual!): 12 x 3-pdr iron long guns, 2 x 24-pdr bronze assault guns (Schrotstucke), 2 x 'mershakar' (a type of swivel gun), until May 1626 (actual): 4 x 6-pdr iron long guns, 6 x 3-pdr iron long guns, until autumn 1626 (actual): as above plus 4 x 3-pdr bronze long guns and 2 x 24-pdr bronze assault guns (Schrotstucke), 1627 (actual): 4 x 3-pdr bronze long guns (heavily under-armed due to service as supply ship in this campaign). I have ignored the following years as they were outside the scope of my study; see my first and fourth papers for the appearance of the Swedish guns and carriages. Crew: 1625 (requirement): 27 sailors, 5 gunners, May 1626 (actual): 20 sailors, 1 gunner (the ship was heavily undermanned due to general lack of manpower), 1628 (requirement and/or actual according to various documents): 48 sailors, 60/50/60/35 troops. Papegojan payroll of 20 sailors from May 1626 (Riksarkivet, Stockholm):

Yes, it's entirely possible, albeit somewhat unpractical. Firstly, most of the data on this ship is scattered in many documents concerning the entire fleet, and secondly, you may not have any use of them as they require extremely difficult transcription and translation. It would be more convenient for me to provide ready-made information that I have already derived of these documents and published more than ten years ago. As an example, I include a copy (both in low and high resolution as PDF) of a document dated 4 May 1624, just after the purchase of the ship and its delivery to Götheborg from Netherlands (Inventarium oppå det skeppet Papegoian, Riksarkivet, Stockholm). There you can read, among other things, that the Papegoian was simply referred to as a square-tuck/transom ship (spegell skipp, or in German Spiegelschiff), that it was then one year old, had one boat (referred to as a galley), length between posts of 86 feet, depth in hold of 11 1/4 feet, an upper deck (bognet, or in Dutch bovenet) 5 feet above the main deck, 14 gun carriages, sails: mainsail with bonnet, foresail with bonnet, spritsail, mizzen sail, main topsail, fore topsail, sprit topsail (blindhe krÿtz segell), (main) topgallant sail. And some other, supposedly less important information (like length of cables and ropes, size of flags etc.). So, if you need just the ready data, I can provide them quite fast, but if you need original documents, it will take much longer to locate and gather them from a set of hundreds of scans. Inventarium Papegoian 1624.pdf

Good question. Indeed, additional effort is sometimes necessary to get a decent curve. – 1st method: simply approximating by eye (sufficient in many cases and evidently used by period designers; allows a slight, deliberate modification of this curve at the stem area), – 2nd method: by defining an additional point on the middle line (better explained in the attached sketch), – 3rd method: by placing the first defining point closer to the stem (the rest of the procedure is the same). And, by the way, the factor can be other than 0.5, yet it is the most convenient number.

The monography of the French frigate La Néréïde 1722 is now being in preparation by the author of many other fine monographs – Jean-Claude Lemineur, and of my utmost curiosity is the exact way the shape of La Néréïde's hull was reconstructed by him. It should be noted that the source plans do not include a line plan of the entire hull, only the profile of the main frame and the longitudinal shape of the vessel. In parallel with the creation of the monograph, an attractive model of the ship is being built by Michele. While it is not quite possible to assess well the hull lines directly from the photos of the model, I get the impression J.-C. Lemineur has taken a similar approach as in his reconstruction of Le François 1683, in which he employed the quadrant type curve for the bow shape. Yet, upon making my own reconstructions, I have discovered that such a curve, while looking good and being very useful for recreating many other parts of the hull, never works satisfactorily for the ships' bows. To put it the other way, it can never be aligned with the corresponding lines in any contemporary ship plans (notwithstanding the many possible modifications of this curve). In turn, the method of deriving this curve shown at the bottom of the attached sketch almost always gives the desired results. This half-distance derived curve can be also modified in many ways to get, say, sharper or blunter bows. Strangely, I have not found this method in any contemporary works on shipbuilding I have consulted, and it was reverse-engineered by trial-and-error.

Okay, if you request it, I will create a new log on this in the Nautical/Naval History section, so as not to disturb Michele's log. Easy, because I kept the backup.

Hello Roman, What a coincidence! You built a ship that took part in a battle in which the flagship was the ship I am currently reconstructing (Polish/German Sankt Georg). An account of this reconstruction can be found on this forum. It is probably too late for this now, as you have already built your model, but in the course of my historical research I also found in the archives in Stockholm quite a few source documents concerning the Papegojan. Amongst other things, these documents contain information on the ship's dimensions, number of sails, armament and crew numbers in the various years of the ship's service. I would follow the 'sea' trials of your Papegojan with the utmost interest.

And also try to look at it from the point of view of an archaeologist doing the documentation. To take my example: I once took measurements of gun barrels in a museum and discovered that, among many other errors, they are not round in cross-section but oval. It would have been unnecessary nonsense to try to reflect this irregular deformation in the dimensioned line drawings. I averaged the measurements, noting this fact in the description, and gave the measurement deviations.... Now ask yourself: how accurately would I want to make a scale model of such a deformed barrel (diameter deformations up to 8 mm and irregular along the length of the barrel). Take into account that all the cannon barrels were deformed in many different ways, even those of the same series.

In such dilemmas, it is also very important for me to answer the question: what was the intention of the original builders? As opposed to what they happened to come up with.

You have already received good advice above. Even the best reconstruction models made by archaeologists are always only an approximation, and a model 100% identical to the original has yet to be built, if that is at all possible. That said, first and foremost you have to decide for yourself whether you want to build a model closer to the archaeological interpretation or a nicer looking display model. As you have already discovered, archaeological documentation is not always precise and you have to interpret. Where numerical data and graphics conflict, I tend to favour the numbers, but not in a fundamentalist way. A lot depends on the context and your choices about the nature of the model.

A, okay, thank you. It was not quite visible on the posted renders. And these unusual scales? 1:22 and 1: 44. Does it mean that the Venetian foot from this period had 11 inches?

This is what I like best - the pure lines of the hull. The thickness of all the frame elements is the same, from the keel up to the top (sheer) line. Is this a deliberate simplification or does it show actual practice?

Druxey, you received a reply, however I later decided to delete my posts regarding this curve, sorry. After all, this is a forum mainly for ship modellers and not geometry enthusiasts or analysts.

A big 'like' awaits completion of the work 🙂

Thank you Michele for starting this log. And you are right – a Venetian capital ship is a real gem among all other ships-of-the-line of this period. I have a special attitude towards Venetian shipbuilding in the early modern era (meaning 15-17th cent.), as I consider it as a kind of ancestor for the later constructions of the north of the continent. Back to the Venetian 18th century ships-of-the-line. Somewhat ironically, the best monograph on them I have in my home library, among quite many other books on Venetian shipbuilding, is the work in German by an Austrian Karl Klaus Körner – Das Erbe der Serenissima. Rekonstruktion und Restaurierung eines venezianischen Linienschiffsmodells von 1794 (Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, Wien 2010). Just from curiosity – have you consulted this monograph too while doing your historical research? I judge this particular work to be of the same high standard as other, much better-known monographs.

I see and am not pressing the issue further. I would only add that you are very lucky to have so many contemporary plans to work with. Thank you very much for your reply, Gérard.

Gérard, So many important and excellent news in your post, thank you very much for them. However, I would try to talk on La Néréïde only, to not risk pushing Michele into the discomfort area 🙂. And the hopes are that Michele would be interested too. Okay – while it is true that La Néréïde main vertical section is quite similar to that of Le Jazon, why not to try to reconstruct the whole hull shape of La Néréïde basing on the known conceptual methods from this period, so splendidly explained by Jean Boudriot in his works? Provided of course that such an attempt would suit the highest rigours of your work. It must be said that it is always some arbitrary choices are simply inevitable in such reconstructions anyway. And the reconstruction of the hull shape by contemporary methods, especially those of B. Ollivier, known to us after all, could be much satisfying and even better than that done for Le François 1683. In this place I must explain that IMHO, while J.-C. Lemineur made an excellent overall job, I am not quite happy with his choice of the curve of the greatest breadth forward in plan (tracé de la lisse du fort avant en plan) and the non-tangential arcs of vertical sections at the height of the greatest breadth line. And I suspect that the general approach adopted would be too detailed and too complex for the 17th century craftsmen/shipbuilders. Having said this, I am waiting impatiently for the monograph of La Néréïde, which is now so beautifully executed by Michele. I expect to find there detailed answers on the so much interesting issue of La Néréïde hull shaping.

Gérard, we are very happy to have a top expert like you on this forum, who have created the world's best and the most reliable ships' plans available. Not sure if I may, but you have also stated the striking news that you have started a monograph of La Néréïde a few years ago. Should we expect two monographs on this ship? Or perhaps you collaborate with J.-C. Lemineur? Or do you work on another monograph now? Or something else? Apologies if my questions are too indiscreet.

Thank you very much Gérard. I found your comments very informative, and the most surprising was your statement that J.-C. Lemineur adapted vertical sections of another ship to make his plans of La Néréïde. This explains much, as until now I have assumed that he has reconstructed the whole hull shape basing on the main frame profile as shown on the original plans/sections of La Néréïde (he had already made a similar try while reconstructing the frigate Le François 1683). Indeed, all the frigate plans show these visually very attractive forecastle 'wings', but only very few of those 'wings' are as much large as in this case, which made me curious. Now it is clear... Thanks again.

And I am curious as to why the forecastle on this ship is so extremely wide at the bow? Unfortunately, just this particular detail can not be derived directly from the original plans of this ship. Is it simply a more or less personal choice of the modern plans designer, J.-C. Lemineur? Perhaps Gérard Delacroix, present on this forum, can answer this?