Onto navy, Did Firaxis got it right about cannon mounted warships since Iberian Caravels (Previous Civ games also included Galleon, it disappears however since Civ5 onwards) that it serves as melee ships and Frigate being bombardment ships (and no Ships of the Line which were much more superior, nor square rigging unlocked two-mast light ships with square rigging and frigate style hulls) I don't think Caravels were still around by the beginning of The Enlightenment, they were pretty much sold to civilian merchants or colonists (AFAIK The Mayflower and other ships that carried The Pilgrims to what's now New England were Caravels I think, small hull and not many guns). Should Caravel exists in the late medieval rather than early renaissance? should there be light assault ships unlocked with Square Rigging tech (serving as Anti-piracy ships or something between Caravel and Ironclad assault ship)?
You know, I think I'm going to have to start saving up all these Monster Posts of mine and collect them as a
Brief Industrial -Military History For Gamers and publish them as a book, with footnotes.
Meanwhile
Renaissance to early Modern ships and warships are a slippery subject, because the characteristics kept changing, and even the construction of ships with the same name/title changed, so there's quite a bit of slack for the gamer or game designer as to what he wants to use and what he wants a given 'type' of ship to do.
Here's a run-down on the Basics of the Renaissance Ship And Where It Came From:
First, there is an almost Complete Break between the Classical Warship, which were all oared galleys, and the Renaissance Warships, which except for some Mediterranean specialties, were all Sailing Ships.
Those almost all start from the
Knorr, the Scandinavia Round Ship that actually did most of the work while the Viking
Longships got all the publicity. A Longship was 6 to 8 times longer than it was wide - appropriately named. The
Knorr was about 2.5 to 3 times as long as it was wide. It was a trader, not a fighter, with one square sail on one mast, and able to carry up to 30 tons or so with a crew of only 5 - 8 men. Parenthetically, almost exactly the same size crew and cargo as the Bronze Age sailing freighters shown in Minoan frescos and found by underwater archeology in the Black Sea, but dating from over 2000 years earlier.
The
Knorr became the
Cog, around 1000 CE (first definite mention of a Cog is from 948 CE). The Cog was still a round ship with the same proportions, one mast and square sail, but a deck and a stern-mounted rudder and a capacity of up to 200 tons but still with a crew of only 8 - 10 men. This is still a coastal vessel - although it was
Knorrs that made it all the way to North America, so that's more of a Navigation Issue than a Seaworthiness Issue - but the
Cog was almost an order of magnitude more economical as a Trade Route vessel: for about the same expenditure in manpower you could move almost 10 times the cargo, a huge difference. It was
Cogs that powered the Hanseatic League's trade all over northern Europe.
The
Cog could also be a Warship. Temporary 'towers' could be mounted fore and aft to give elevated platforms for archers or crossbowmen to blaze away at attempted boarders or clear the enemy decks for your own melee troops. Medieval Naval Battles, for the most part, were simply Sea Battles fought with Land Weapons and Tactics, with drowning added to the usual combat dangers of being stabbed, shot, trampled, or hacked to pieces.
The
Hulk was, after a start as a river boat, an enlarged
Cog with the towers now Permanent but still 'added on' after the hull was formed. They start replacing
Cogs on city crests about 1240 CE, still firmly in the Middle Ages. As the towers got built up and integrated into the hull and a second mast was added, by the mid-1400s
Hulks start to look very similar to
Carracks.
The
Carrack is the first definitively Renaissance Ship, but it started long before the Renaissance. The Genoese developed
Cogs into larger and deeper hulls called
Cochas after 1304 CE, which by 1380 CE were referred to as
Carracks. The deeper hull meant more than one deck, and the earliest ones had two masts - front mast square rigged, rear mast with a lateen sail. Except for the sails, the hull looked very similar to the
Hulk at first. But it kept changing. By 1468 CE they are depicted with large fore and stern 'castles' built as part of the hull, and three masts, the rear one lateen rigged, but the front two with multiple square sails - topsails have been added. By the end of the 15th Century they are up to 1000 tons weight and true Ocean-Going vessels. Versions of the
Carrack are also the first sailing warships some of which were designed to carry Cannon.
We have a lot of information about
Carracks, because one of them, the
Mary Rose from England, sank right off the coast and was raised with most of its armament, and there are also numerous records of her construction in 1510 - 1512 CE. She weighed about 500 tons, carried 5 to 9 large 'anti-ship' cannon firing stone shot and 60 - 70 'anti-personnel' guns, most of them firing 1 - 2 pounds of stone or metal shot at short range. She had two gun decks, 4 masts, and also carried a large complement of longbows, bills, pikes, and other weapons for boarding actions. It required an estimated 40 acres of forest to provide the timber for her: these were NOT cheap ships!
Right after and overlapping with the
Carrack came the
Caravel. This was originally a Portuguese design, developed from the
Balinger of the Mediterranean, a small Medieval coastal sailing fishing vessel around 1450 CE. They were small, 50 - 160 tons, with 1 to 3 masts, all Lateen rigged, very fast and maneuverable - an excellent 'scout' or exploration vessel. These are the ships that started pushing down the African coast and into the Indian Ocean. By the end of the 1400s they started adding low stern and forecastles and square-rigging the foremast, which developed them into the larger Portuguese
Nau, which could safely make it all the way to the Pacific and opened up the Spice trade out of Indonesia for the Portuguese. The original
Caravel was too small to carry heavy cannon, but they were armed with lots of smaller 'swivel guns' or oversize shotguns, and the
Nau could be armed with heavy cannon once the closable Gun Port was invented around 1500 CE.
And right after 1500, in 1517 CE, the first
Galleon appears. It was at that date, though, a Spanish copy of the Venetian
Galleone, a ship combining oars and sails to chase pirates, and therefore not a true Open Ocean vessel at all. By 1530 CE the
Galleon had become a pure sailing ship with a longer, lower, and narrower hull than a
Carrack, a high stern castle but low forecastle. It still had the lateen-rigged mizzen mast, but square-rigged main and foremasts. They were much more maneuverable than
Carracks, and the sailing
Galleons were built sturdy enough to mount cannon from the beginning. By the 1550s Spanish "War Galleons" were carrying up to Demi-Cannon: wrought iron or cast bronze guns firing 32 pound shot.
The next development came from one man. In 1570 CE John Hawkins in England launched the
Foresight, the first
Race-Built Galleon. It weighed in at 300 tons, so about half the size of the big Spanish Treasure Galleons, but had a relatively low superstructure and a single continuous gun deck carrying 28 large cannon. It could sail closer to the wind and was more maneuverable than the older
Galleons or
Carracks, and by 1588 Hawkins had rebuilt most of England's older
Galleons into the 'race-built' form and they shot the Great (Spanish) Armada to pieces. A good example of the difference between the 'old'
Galleon and the race-built type is the configuration of the flagships of the two fleets in 1588:
San Martin de Portugal was the Spanish flagship, built in 1577 CE in Portugal, weighing 1000 tons and carrying 24 cannon and 24 smaller 'swivel guns'
Ark Royal was the English flagship, built in 1587 in England, 555 tons, carrying 50 tons of cannon, including 38 large bronze cannon plus 18 'swivel guns'.
In other words, not only was the race-built
Ark Royal faster and more maneuverable, she carried 50% more firepower on half the tonnage of the older
Galleon.
The culmination of the Renaissance warship was in the early 1600s.
1610 the
Prince Royal was launched in England. She weighed 1200 - 1330 tons, had 2 continuous gun decks holding 55 heavy cannon.
In 1637 the
Sovereign of the Seas was launched in England, the Ultimate Renaissance "Battleship". She weighed 1522 tons, later increased to 1800 tons, had 3 continues gun decks carrying 90 - 103 cannon, including 28 guns firing 32 to 40 pound shot: "ship killers". It was the first ship to have 3 full gun decks, and the first to carry over 100 cannon. She was so formidable and large, in fact, that no one was entirely sure what to do with her.
Until 1653.
In that year Robert Blake, the English "General-at-Sea" issued his
Sailing and Fighting Instructions which specified that naval battles would be fought in a line of ships pounding each other with broadsides of cannon shot. Since the
Sovereign of the Seas could throw a half-ton of shot in a single broadside, she became the prototype of the Ship-of-the-Line that dominated naval warfare from the mid-17th to the early 19th centuries.
So (finally!!!) Here's The Gamer's Summary of Ships For 4X Gaming:
Cog - 1000 CE, or middle of the Medieval Era, warship and trading ship, coastal only
Carrack - 1460 CE, or very beginning of the Renaissance Era, primitive cannon-armed warship with Open Ocean capability
Caravel - 1450 CE, beginning of the Renaissance Era, Open Ocean exploration ship, Not cannon-armed. Special or Unique to Portugal, which can develop it into the
Nau, an armed trader with cannon, by the mid-Renaissance Era
Galleon - 1530 CE, bigger and better-armed than the
Carrack, and by 1620s the 'Flota Galleon' was the standard design for the great Treasure Ships of Spain.
Ship-of-the-Line - 1660 CE, the multi-decked, all big gun ship of the post-Renaissance to early Industrial Era.
This is also the ship that is the ancestor of the Battleship. The term originally was "Line of Battle Ship" a ship with enough weight and firepower to survive in the Line of Battle of the 18th century. In Germany, Battleships in the 20th century were still called
Linenschiffe "Line Ships" - another sign of the essential Conservatism of navies.
In Civ VI terms, the
Cog, Caravel and
Carrack would all be Melee Ships, the
Galleon and
Ship-of-the-Line would be Ranged.
1. So Savannah was the first 'Steam and sail' ships? and what's the last of this kind and its fate, had it been converted into all steam once superior engines became available?
2. And what is the first ironclad warships being dubbed 'Battleships' and who built it? is it designed to be successor to Ships of the Line?
3. Should (Dreadnough) Battleships be a successor to Frigate? or should there be a new class of warships which made Frigates a light ranged and Ships of the Line being heavyweight and badass but slow (strong ranged attack with melee defenses) and Frigates should be upgraded to Cruisers and Battlecruisers and the linear ended with Missile Cruisers instead?
1. Sailing ships were still used as freight carriers right down to the early twentieth century: here was a shipyard right down the road from me in Tacoma, Washington that was still building sailing freight-carriers in 1910. As long as you had steady winds and not carrying time-sensitive cargo, they were much cheaper to operate than anything with an engine!
2. As mentioned above, the term Battleship was used from the beginning of the 18th century to refer to Ships-of-the-Line. It started to be applied specifically to 'ironclad' ships in the late 1870s, when France, Britain, Italy and other European powers started building Ironclads with central or center-line batteries of big guns that were distinctively different and heavier in armament and weight from the steam frigates or protected cruisers. In 1892 the term was officially adopted by the British Royal Navy to refer to the largest ships with the heaviest guns - the only ships capable of surviving in a gun battle with similar ships. In that respect, they were the direct successors to the
Ship-of-the-Line: nothing else but another 'Battleship' could fight them and stay afloat.
3.
Frigate originally meant simply a ship that was faster and lighter than other ships, so it does not belong anywhere in any collection of Battleships. The term Frigate was used pretty indiscriminately until 1740, when France built the first 'definitive' Frigate: the
Medoc, a 3 masted full-rigged Ship with one continuous gun deck, very low superstructure. They were almost twice as fast as the
Galleons of the previous century but only carried about half the guns of the average Ship-of-the-Line and carried lighter guns as well (average Line of Battle ship carried 60 - 100 guns up to 36 - 42 pounders, average Frigate carried 32 - 38 guns up to 18 pounders - huge difference in Firepower)
Sailing Frigates became Steam Frigates starting around 1843 and afterwards, and then started doing away with auxiliary sails and adding armor in the late 1870s as Protected Cruisers. After the 1890s Cruisers got divided formally into Light (almost no armor) and Heavy (or Armored Cruisers).
The Battle Cruiser was a different Fish entirely. They were Battleship-sized hulls or larger, the first launched in 1906 immediately after the first Dreadnaught Battleship, and were classed like Battleships as 'Capital Ships'. The idea was that they would about the same firepower as a Dreadnaught Battleship, but lighter armor so they were faster. The problem was that as a result they could not stand up to Battleship guns: 3 British Battlecruisers were blown to bits at Jutland in 1916, the only 'capital ships' lost in that battle, and the
HMS Hood, another Battlecruiser, was sunk by a single salvo from the
Bismarck in 1941. They were just too fragile.
On the other hand, Battleships were just as fast as the BattleCruisers by 1915, less than 10 years after they started building them, so after that the best use for BattleCruisers was to take their fast hulls and big engines and convert them into Aircraft Carriers: Japan, Britain, and the USA all did this in the 1920s and 1930s, so that by the time WWII started about 1/3 of all the large aircraft carriers in service were ex-BattleCruiser hulls.
The first Missile Cruisers were regular Heavy Cruisers with some heavy guns replaced by missile batteries - at first antiaircraft missiles, then 'cruise' missile batteries. The modern naval nomenclature gets very sloppy, though. The difference between a Missile Cruiser and a Missile Frigate is negligible, and even small 'Gun Boats' with cruise missiles can have the firepower of a WWI Battleship. The latest Destroyer design from the US Navy weighs more than a WWII Heavy Cruiser and the largest battery of cruise missiles ever mounted on a single ship was the Tomahawk array on the US Battleship
Iowa when it was brought back into service after Vietnam.
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