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This article was clearly written by a non-sailor as his terminology is very odd. The phrase "heel over" is particularly confusing. All sailboats heel on most p
by jordanb 15y ago
This article was clearly written by a non-sailor as his terminology is very odd.
The phrase "heel over" is particularly confusing. All sailboats heel on most points of sail. When he says the boat "heels over" at 10⁰.. I assume that means the boat's Angle of Vanishing Stability (AVS) was a mere 10⁰? If so, the boat was very unseaworthy indeed.
Seaworthy square riggers would have had an AVS of more than 70⁰ with closer to 90⁰ being ideal. Modern externally-ballasted keelboats have an AVS well in excess of 90⁰, many in the 120-130⁰ range, meaning the mast can be completely submerged and the boat will still come back up if it isn't down-flooded.
Another point that stuck out to me: He said that the additional gundeck in the 17th century lead to a change in tactics from boarding with marines and taking the enemy vessel as a prize to simply outright sinking of the vessel.
In fact, prize-taking remained the dominant goal of naval battle until the late 19th century when exploding ordinance and long-range standoff guns rendered it impractical. Consider the battle of Trafalgar in 1805: The British captured 21 French and Spanish vessels and sank only one.
- AngryParsley 15y ago>This article was clearly written by a non-sailor as his terminology is very odd. This is a parable about modern software development. The author is a compsci professor. From the biography section at the bottom: Richard E. (Dick) Fairley is a professor of computer science and director of the software engineering program at the Oregon Graduate Institute. Thanks for the cool facts about ships, though.
- mgedmin 15y agoThis comment was clearly written by a non-Unicode expert ;) U+2070 SUPERSCRIPT ZERO (⁰) is not the same character as U+00B0 DEGREE SIGN (°). They look rather distinct on my screen (I assume both characters come from Verdana, the font specified in the CSS of this site).
- jordanb 15y agoI used Compose-^-0 to generate it. That used to make a degree sign. I guess it makes slightly more sense for it to be a superscript though. I wonder what the new compose sequence for degree is..
- mongol 15y ago> If so, the boat was very unseaworthy indeed. Yes, indeed. It sank after 1300 m on it's maiden voyage..