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Board » Technical Discussion » Historical Ships Sailing Polars

Posted by
Water Bear


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2009-07-31 16:20:17
2016-05-03 01:26:08 - Historical Ships Sailing Polars
I'm interested in either authoritative or speculative answers to the question of where does SOL come upon the Polars for Viking ships and Tall ships. As a hobby project I've been working on a game simulating historical (especially naval) ship performance. My dream is to have unique performance models for a wide variety of ships from the Age of Sail and set them against each other in various scenarios. I expect I'll have to creatively extrapolate their performance from a wide variety of sources. However I was excited to see that at least some one has charted some boats based on modern replications like the Barque used in the SOL Tall Ships series and the Longship Drake. So any input on additional sources would be very gratefully received.

If you're interested in the topic at all I'll share a link to an article I read in my research this afternoon: http://www.cnrs-scrn.org/northern_mariner/vol13/tnm_13_4_29-39.pdf

That article by popular historian Sam Wills really drives home how horrible (by racing sloop standards) the upwind performance of these ships might have been and makes it all the more remarkable what feats of navigation were achieved during the golden age of sail.
Tardigrades the slow-walking extremophile.

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