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Waldemar

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  1. Waldemar
    In addition, and for comparison, another design drawing made around 1660, but this time by an equally professional shipbuilder Jakob Jakobsson Prunk of the Dutch origin. Frame profiles were not needed in this case at all, as this 18-gun frigate was most likely to be built in the Dutch fasion, i.e. by the shell (bottom-first) method. But again, look at the draughtsmanship standard (Swedish archives).
  2. Waldemar
    True. As an example of a ship drawing from the 17th century, I still include below a plan of a yacht from 1665, which was built at the Götheborg shipyard by an Englishman, Francis Sheldon. This is the oldest extant ship plan in Sweden showing the profile of the frames (stern only). As you can see, the drawing standard is still far from the precise 18th century convention (Swedish archives). I will no longer carry out a reconstruction of this shape, but the frame profiles indicate quite clearly that the designer used the conventional frame-moulding method.
  3. Waldemar
    In fact, I do not insist on accepting or confirming this interpretation. But the mere awareness of such a possibility might just come in handy for you while potentially inspecting some period plan.
  4. Waldemar
    The Danish ship Prins Christian (renamed 1673 as Christianus Quintus) was built on contract at the Neustadt shipyard. Sorry, but if the content of this thread so far is not convincing enough, it remains to refer to Sutherland's original work. I may find some more examples, but by accident rather than by deliberate search. The copy of the plan of the French ship made available is quite poor and the lines are not quite clear. Anyway, just a note here that this was a transitional period in France at the time as far as the shape of the stern is concerned and it may be some strange hybrid. Why not try to interpret this shape yourself?
  5. Waldemar
    I am not sure that the example with the French ship is quite relevant. This ship was built by the designer René Levasseur in 1692. By this time, the French shipbuilders were already using newer design methods, using geometrical diagonal lines, unlike the British, who were still using one frame-moulding variant or another for quite a long time. Firstly, as can be seen from the drawing, the lines of the French ship were reconstructed in the British fashion (frame-moulding), so it is certainly not an accurate representation of the hull shape. Secondly, the problem of bottom curves was solved in a completely different way in the French method, but that's another story....
  6. Waldemar
    To be honest, I don't see any contradiction in our statements, and the answer to this kind of doubt is probably also simple: around the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries there was a change in drawing convention to a more precise one, with Sutherland still representing the old school. And I remind that the Danish ship was built 1665. There is no doubt that ships could have been built according to plans (with some reasonable tolerance). On the other hand, we have 'countless' examples of ships built for the Navy, especially by private shipyards, oversized by 5, 10, 15% or even more in relation to their design (largely for financial reasons), so the differences must have been counted in feet rather than in inches. These were accepted, paid for and successfully put into service.
  7. Waldemar
    Unfortunately, there is no indication of the experimental nature of the Danish ship. On the contrary, her very long, intensive and successful service (about 40 years) also rather proves that this is not some kind of experimental, bizarre fantasy, mostly unsuccessful. Instead, there is Sutherland's work explaining this phenomenon very convincingly. So personally, I see the Danish ship as a 'standard' vessel, just like 99.9% or tens of thousands of other vessels. I guess a good analogy is the simplistic, common way of drawing threads in modern engineering drawings, which does not show their true outline at all. Today it is common knowledge that this is just a drawing convention to save the draftsmen time, but what about the interpretation of such drawings by archaeologists five hundred years from now? 🙂
  8. Waldemar
    From my observations, the simplest possible explanations and methods are usually correct. In post #9 you will find my brief interpretation of this phenomenon, and after every hull I draw I am more and more sure of it. On the surface it may seem that the method of drawing used by designers or draughtsmen is longer and more difficult, but in fact the opposite is true. If you do drawings, whether by hand or computer, you can check this for yourself. Try drawing a few frame profiles using both methods, and for this exercise you may follow Sutherland's instructions shown in this thread. You will find that it is much more difficult and longer to draw the shipyard profiles that were obtained with wooden templates – it's endless fitting by trial and error. In this light, it is clear to me that the designers actually used shortcuts to speed up the drawing. In contrast, it was much more convenient and quicker to use wooden templates in the shipyard. To put it another way, it was a kind of drawing convention, and 'everyone' knew that the floor/hollowing lines would only be finally formed on the mould loft in the shipyard. As is clear just from Sutherland's description. The shape of the ship you posted above gave me a good laugh.... 🙂 What an imagination!
  9. Waldemar
    Waterlines and diagonals of the reconstructed hull section of the Danish ship. I have not made any corrections.
  10. Waldemar
    Martes, thanks a lot again for pointing me to previously unknown material from 1657. As for this ship plan from the Russian archives (Hermitage), a poor copy of it was first published in the Russian journal Судостроение 1971/08 (Shipbuilding 1971/08) in an article by A. I. Dubravin, Shipbuilding in the age of the Northern War (in Russian). This plan is described in this article as an example of a design drawing from that time, i.e. circa 1700. This is, of course, nonsense. Personally, I think they were simply brought to Russia by Tsar Peter I from his travels in western Europe. I reverse-engineered this plan a few years ago and found many of the proportions consistent with the 1620 shipbuilding manuscript. As in the example illustration below. In the process, I have also made a simple 3D model as a feasibility test.
  11. Waldemar
    Thank you very much Druxey. To finish the job one more diagram comparing the design profiles of the Danish ship with the possible profile shapes that could have actually been traced in the shipyard (according to the Sutherland way). I have made no attempt to get these two sets as similar as possible. Now I ask myself: which set would I choose for my model or reconstruction of this ship if such an attempt were made?
  12. Waldemar
    Well, I try very hard to keep to the spirit of the age... 🙂 Many thanks to you as well, because through this very exercise I too have become more familiar with the ins and outs of period ship design. 🙂
  13. Waldemar
    Many thanks Martes for these links, much appreciated! And you may be perfectly right about the creator of these draughts now kept in the Russian archives. Similarities to the other Balfour's draughts are striking indeed. Once, when examining just a copy of this plan in detail, I also noticed many similarities to the specific proportions, shapes and methods as described in an English manuscript from around 1620. If I had copies of the originals at the time, rather than just this poor redrawing... Anyway, the original drawing, in contrast to its poor copy, show the frame profiles as having the floor curves, so, as a replacement another draught, better suited to my narrative (from the Danish archives). It should replace the first one inserted in post #12:
  14. Waldemar
    Firstly, I determined through fitting that all green arcs have the same radius, and all blue arcs have different radii. Then I determined more or less arbitrarily the triangle for the blue curves. The red lines were drawn first, then (inside the triangle) the blue arcs as tangents to the red arcs and the horizontal lines, and finally the green arcs tangent to the previously drawn sections of the profiles. It would even be similar to the conventional moulding method if it weren't for all those variable radii. For greater clarity, I have included another diagram below.
  15. Waldemar
    Done. The way the designer of this ship plotted the bottom curves on the plan is not as elegant as the method described by Sutherland. However, this does not matter much in practice, as in both cases these curves were redone by the shipyard workers during the actual construction of the ship anyway. And most likely in an identical manner.
  16. Waldemar
    Trying to reverse engineer this plan in a more regular way (btw, the ship's designer is Claus Reimer). The general method is already understood, only those troublesome floor curves remain to be reconstructed...
  17. Waldemar
    Nihil novi sub sole. 🙂 To conclude this thread, I also present a design draught of the Danish ship Printz Christian built in 1665, i.e. some 45 years before Sutherland's work was published. A quick check of the frame lines proves that this ship was designed on the conoidal solid principle, so that the cross-sections of the submerged part of the hull have the shape of a perfect arc with varying radii for different frames (Danish archives). Moreover, the shape of the floor curves is somewhat 'suspicious', and I think that these bottom curves are also rather for illustrative purposes only on the plan, to be properly formed on the mould loft in the shipyard, as described in the Sutherland's work.
  18. Waldemar
    This rather poor copy of the plan, which I estimate to date from the early 17th century, is perhaps the best visual example of these practices. The profiles of the main frame and the forward 'quarter' frame are not even designed as having floor curves. Only the shapes above the rising floor line were drawn, and the floor curves were apparently 'left to the discretion of the actual builder' by the designer of the ship (Russian archives). And there are other contemporary ships' plans which, for example, show these floor curves only as a symbolic faint line drawn rather for illustrative purposes and/or completeness. Just as on this design draught of the Danish ship Tre Kroner (1604) by Scotsman David Balfour (Danish archives).
  19. Waldemar
    And, in this state of affairs, it would not be out of place to ask today's modellers: which model would you like to make, according to the design lines or the real ones? 🙂
  20. Waldemar
    Mark, you have made me more precise on this point: 🙂 After reading a number of works on naval architecture, I get the impression that constructing floor curves was a routine procedure used by ship carpenters. And for this very reason the early designers and writers simply did not bother with it. In one of the source works, for example, one can literally read (from memory): "the floor curves are left to the discretion of the actual builder". Sutherland was obviously aware of these common practices as well, and this is the reason for the dualism in his work. On the one hand, it was easier to draw on paper the frames of two arcs and a line, but on the other it was more convenient to use templates in the shipyard. In other words, he knew that the lines he designed would be modified by the ways used the shipyard, so he gave the method to do it more easily and correctly. This is a fortunate circumstance, because through this we learn how these floor curves were practically determined on the mould loft.
  21. Waldemar
    Below are the pictures of La Néréïde's model kindly provided by Michele. Now its bow lines can be better appreciated, and it happily seems that they are as perfect as on the contemporary ships' plans, samples of which are shown above in this thread.
  22. Waldemar
    Sì, grazie Michele. Ora è molto chiaro che queste linee sono eccellenti e simili a quelle delle altre navi, il che mi rende felice. Yes, thank you Michele. It is now very clear that these lines are excellent and similar to the lines on other ships, which makes me happy.
  23. Waldemar
    To be sure: all the above is based on Sutherland's description. It is quite obvious that he must have agreed to such a lack of precision. Wooden floor templates were to be aligned in the following way: they should pass through the point on the keel (or post), be tangent to the frame arc, and the point connecting its straight part with circular part should lie on the auxiliary line (drawn in blue in the diagram). All of this is shown in the third diagram above. Quite tricky, yet unambiguous.
  24. Waldemar
    This is perfectly correct. "Connecting tangent lines" should rather be read as "Connecting lines tangent to two arcs". This was just a mental shortcut to keep the description as compact as possible. Sorry. In the diagram below a possible unintentional modification of the frame profiles in the process of actual construction is visually shown, more as a matter of showing the phenomenon itself, rather than its specific magnitude, as this effect could have been reduced by placing auxiliary (guiding) lines in better spots. Either way, the problem of constructing the floor lines was invariably treated in the early works on naval architecture at the most as secondary or not at all, and the Sutherland's description is perhaps the first to deal with it clearly enough.
  25. Waldemar

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