Re: SPELLJAMMER Art

From: "Charles Sykora" <charlesdsykora@???.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 03, 2007 5:22 PM

>I love your art, but if I remember correctly, you are the guy that
> thinks the original sizes as published in the canon materials are
> unworkable.  While they aren't perfect, I think they are much closer
> to some of the super-size ships I've seen in your deck plans (if you
> are the guy I'm thinking about).

One of the problems with keeping things cannon is that D&D is often not 
internally consistent.

For example the new 3e and 3.5e versions of D&D have tinkered with things 
like spell ranges, movement rates, time and the maximum spell level for 
clerics. So if you convert things from 2e to 3e you need to follow the 
spirit of the rules and make your best guess as to how things should be. You 
are always going to get one person who thinks that something is now 
overpowered or underpowered.

The same applies to the ship plans. A lot of people think that certain ships 
are too small. Other people, like you, think that ships are fine. However, 
the original stats don't really provide height and someone building a 3d 
model has to take their best guess with that.

> I posted once my logic (as a
> submariner who knows how much you can do with a very small space and
> how much space you need for 120 men to live in) as to why I preferred
> the published sizes, but you never replied to my post.

We could always discuss it now.

Maybe there are some "scientific" ways that we can "test" the size of a 
ship. Perhaps Steven could scan in the 2d artwork for a giff, stick it on a 
ship and show us his problem. And perhaps you could let us know how many 
guys you could fit into the rooms of the SJ ships he has on his website.

From: "Steven" <steven.james.1@??????????.??.uk>
Sent: Thursday, January 04, 2007 8:48 AM

> Yup that's me ;)

Burn the heretic! ;-)

> Well, deck railings have to be 3'--4' high, I usually work off 3'. Most
> sailing vessels of 14000-1700s seem to have 3 to 4' high railings, as they
> were also to save you from attack and be defensive.

Don't forget to include room for plenty of belaying pins.

> I look at the exterior and then interior plans, and the interior plans 
> often
> simply don't match up. And there's no way you could have giff or other 
> such
> races onboard most of the original designs.

Hmm. I've been on the Cutty Sark, HMS Victory and HMS Warrior (Britain's 
first iron hulled ship -a good inspiration for anyone wanting to make that 
sort of thing for SJ). I've also looked at the Mary Rose (although you can't 
get up close to it yet). All of these ships had low ceilings, meaning that 
tall sailors would be forced to stoop. Crossbeams intrude onto the deck 
below, meaning that even sailors who are not tall need to duck as they walk 
around. And don't get me started on their dangerously steep stairs. The guys 
who worked on ships must have been used to ducking and dodging things 
automatically.

> Look at a clipper ship and actual cargo ships from say 1500-1600, those 
> were
> big.

Spelljammer doesn't have a culture of mass shipping. Cargos are implied to 
be items of value rather than bulk.

> I get yer point about submarines but that doesn't apply because...very
> different. Few crews so well trained, facilities and weapon systems very
> different etc etc :)

The English (and later British) Royal Navy and the Spanish navy are both 
probably the major inspirations for Spelljammer's ship culture.

Historians, have recently been debunking some of the ideas that the early 
Royal Navy mistreated is sailors. I've read that during the time of Nelson, 
the crews of ships that captured enemy shipping (including enemy merchant 
ships) would receive a share of the prize. Sailors that were lucky enough to 
capture ships could finish their service with quite a good sum of money. 
This page has more information on the exact shares a crewman might get:

http://www.hms.org.uk/nelsonsnavyprize.htm

Historians have also been debunking the idea that sailors ate rotten 
biscuits filled with maggots and weevils. You can read why this is now 
thought to be untrue here:

http://www.hms.org.uk/nelsonsnavymaggot.htm

Anyone interested in reading more about Nelson's navy can see all of the 
articles by The Historical Maritime Society here:

http://www.hms.org.uk/nelsonsnavymain.htm

Compared to the society in civilian Britain, I believe that the sailors of 
the Royal Navy were well fed and well trained. They may not have the same 
equipment as today's sailors, but I think that captains would want to keep 
training high to improve their chances of capturing enemy shipping.

However, the amount of training a sailor has or the type of equipment they 
use doesn't really have a bearing on the size of Spelljammer ships.

If you want to be historically accurate then I believe you will find that in 
the past people ate a poor diet when they were growing and were often 
shorter than they are today. Even if some people are taller than others a 
captain would still be able to find himself a supply of spacefaring humans 
that were of a height that was useful to you.

In Spelljammer, many of the ships only have weapons on open decks. The deck 
height here is not important as weapons like catapults don't have anything 
above them. In fact if anything is an issue it would probably be rigging and 
sails close to catapults.

> A racing yacht definitely doesn't apply, totally
> "false" design compared to a trading/warship.

I'm not sure what this comment means. I would have thought that all designs 
would evolve to the shape and size that works best.

One of the problems with Spelljammer ships vs. sailing ships is that a 
sailing ship needs to have sails to catch wind and that would encourage 
designers to make the area of sails as large as possible. Spelljamming ships 
get their propulsion from the helm and only use their sails to improve 
manoeuvrability. This means we can't necessarily depend on the same logic as 
a sea vessel.

If you look at the issues with Spelljamming ships they are: good or poor 
manoeuvrability, crew requirements (i.e. the minimum crew), maximum crew (or 
number of tons of air a ship displaces), ability to land on the ground or 
the sea, number of hull points, hull material (connected to saving throws) 
and cargo capacity. Some of that stuff is the same as Earth ships, but other 
stuff is different.

> Real life merchant vessels did have crew crammed in, but, they didn't
> require helm rooms, rooms occupied by weird spell casters and so on.

According to page 18 of CoAS: "The spelljamming helm is a device formed like 
a great chair, with recesses for the head, feet, and arms of the person 
using it."

How much room does a guy sitting in a chair take up? The helmsman probably 
shares the room with the ships officers anyway as the navigator would want 
to be able to talk to him.

I think it is Night Druid who has proposed that certain helms (like death 
helms) should be larger objects that contain a victim rather than chairs 
where victims sit happily while they die. (That is my words not his.) As far 
as I know the original material makes most helms chairs. (Adam's logic 
probably makes more sense, but I'm fairly sure that an iron maiden 
containing a victim connected to a chair where a helmsman, who doesn't die 
sits shouldn't be that big either.)

> The ram and tail flukes on the squidship are enormous, the "snail shell" 
> of
> the nautiloid would make the gravity plane much higher than it's supposed 
> to
> be...thus making gravity plane same height as the catapult deck, making 
> the
> ballista deck totally unusable. But I let them be, though I reduced the
> thickness of the ram on the squidship as it was grossly unbalanced.

Given the appearance of some spelljamming ships, I've always worked on the 
assumption that the gravity plane doesn't bisect the ship at half its 
horizontal height. If ships worked that way you wouldn't be able to have 
tall masts.

Now you could say that maybe ships "should" have a gravity that bisects the 
ship horizontally according to its mass. However, I've always operated on 
the assumption that some designers (including the people that designed the 
Nautiloid) could influence the exact position of the gravity plane. There is 
a weird ship with three gravity planes (I can't remember the name) and if it 
is possible to do that sort of thing, then I don't see why the Nautiloid 
can't push the gravity plane downwards.

If gravity does have to be connected with mass, someone "sticking up" for 
the Nautilod could always argue that the ram and lower areas are made from 
massively dense material while the shell is made of much lighter and thinner 
material.

However, rather than do the maths, I'd rather just trust the designers when 
they say the gravity plane is where it is. Trying to apply scientific 
principles to Spelljammer doesn't always give you meaningful results, 
because a lot of the laws of wildspace are fantasy rather than reality.

> When I build I use a program that builds in exact sizes, I use imperial
> since it's easy for scaling. I import a human model to check sizes and so 
> on
> if I need but, as said, it's all built in/on a grid to foot scale. Then I
> have to think about giff etc. I know sailing vessels had to build as tight
> as possible, but they didn't have 8' tall crew and they weren't as small 
> as
> many folk think (depends entirely on what ships were talking about). The 
> oft
> said Santa Maria was a ~small~ ship for her era.

Sadly the original boxed set doesn't include deck heights so there isn't 
really any cannon material to go from. You've taken your best guess. I'm 
sure that some of us will agree with you while others will argue with you.

The good news is that you can't really work out the scale of Spelljamming 
ships at long range, so your pictures will probably please most people.

> I rebuilt ballistas to exact real-life sizes as well.

That is logical. But then again, how big is a ballista? They must come in 
different sizes.

> So should I decide to make ships unusable by giffs, umber hulks and other
> such big races? If so, then how do they fit into the entire setting?

Maybe you should look at the "built by" section in the ship information. If 
a ship is built by halflings then it probably is more likely to have lower 
ceilings than if it is built by spacesea giants.

> Classic one is the mind flayer nautiloid, as the internal deckplan doesn't
> make sense for the size of illustration.
> http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/sj/nautiloid/nautiloid_cutaway2.jpg
> that shot shows the problem clearly.
> Then add in problem of: slaves, food for slaves and mind flayers require
>brains to survive...the Nautiloid is said to be 35' tons, no way in hell 
>can
> it be 35' tons even going by original deckplans it's much bigger than the
> Hammership!

I think Night Druid also has issues with the size of certain ships. He split 
the Elven Man-O-War into two ships on this page:

http://www.spelljammer.org/ships/drydock/Manowar.html

He has made a new Man-O-War that matches the scale and a new Elven Cutter 
that matches the deckplans.

Out of interest, how much space are you allowing for slaves? I've heard that 
real slave ships packed in slaves so much that many of them died on the 
voyage. Here is a website with a diagram of a real ship showing slaves 
packed in:

http://www.garstangfairtrade.org.uk/slave_trade.htm

Spelljammer tons seem to be displacement tons rather than mass. Although 
having said that 35 tons of air would give you enough air for one person to 
breath fresh air for 3,920 days or to put it another way 3,920 people enough 
air to breath fresh air for one day. So if the mind flayers packed in the 
600 slaves put onto a real slaving ship then they would only be able to 
travel for 6 and a half days before the air went foul!

I think that the original designers of Spelljammer got the pictures of ships 
drawn first and then wrote the backgrounds and statistics around the 
designs. Most ships have no statistics for height and errors may easily have 
crept in. However, your Nautiloid does seem to have high decks in this view:

http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/sj/nautiloid/nautiloid_cutaway.jpg

There is what looks like a helm on the top deck and it seems to have a lot 
of headroom above it.

I've seen an interesting picture showing size categories:

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/images/ph35_gallery/PHB35_PG150_WEB.jpg

It would be interesting to see someone take the artwork from Spelljammer 
monster compendiums and put them together on the same scale. However, many 
monsters (like umberhawks) seem to stoop, making it harder to work out how 
high they really are. Do we get given the fully stretched up height or the 
bent over height?

> Another point is the neogi Deathspider, it is indeed, enormous, the
> originals give it an INTERNAL deckplan of 210' long, but the front of the
> illustration says it has a 175' long keel! That's the deck , not including
> the legs. And since you've got umber hulks it absolutely requires 10' 
> doors.

You probably need to look at the ships on a case by case basis. I think that 
some original ships probably work better than others at their stated size.

> So I'm stuck, if I stick to the originals, they don't work it's
> non-sensical. Sigh.

Maybe that's why the Shadow of the Spider Moon guy threw out the ships and 
made new ones.

> I could re-do the Tradesman, but it would still need much larger deck
> entrances than original design shows as as said, large races would find 
> them
> utterly unusable. Should I stick with 6' ceilings, or 10' as I did to 
> allow
> giff the ability to actually use that ship?

If I remember rightly, it was you that posted illustrations of problems with 
staircases. Maybe you could try out Night Druid's approach and do a certain 
ship at two scales. That sort of thing might convince Charles that you are 
right - or convince you that he is right.

And from Chales's side, perhaps he could give us some measurements of door 
sizes and average height's of submarine crewmen. Spelljamming ships have one 
advantage over submarines, in that large humanoids *can* sleep on the open 
deck. I tried skimming through the Cloakmaster Books to see what they said 
about Gomja (the giff) walking about on a Spelljamming ship, but couldn't 
find anything useful.

Can anyone find any descriptions of large humanoids walking around on ships? 
Alternatively can anyone find any TSR artwork of people within ships. We 
could use that to support the side of Stephen or Charles. Do you think that 
a giff can stoop to 6 foot?

> My re-designed ship sizes:
> Nautiloid 219' (original 180')
> Deathspider 254' (original 175', and original size is smaller than the
> deckplan shows which is a glaring obvious error and leaves out the length 
> of
> the legs of the grapple ram)
> Tradesman 159' (original 120')
> Squidship 201' (original 250')

So if you have changed the size of the ships, have you kept the deck plans 
the same? I presume you have kept something the same. Is it the proportions? 
The ships certainly feel SJish to me. Although the Nautiliod "seems" big to 
me, I'm not entirely sure how big or small it should look (if we stuck to 
the deckplans).

What happens if you use your 3d models to make new 2d deckplans? I've seen 
one of your designs where you did this, but wonder if the rest of the ships 
look good in 2d.

> Notice that I made the squidship shorter than actual. Now have a good look
> at the squidships illustration, then it's deckplan...both are
> irreconcilable!

Ug!. You're right. The deckplans for this ship have a sterncastle that is 
squarish, while the picture shows a sterncastle that is almost rectangular.

Now you made me look, I've noticed that the sterncastle on the Hammership is 
also wrong. The sterncastle should go back further than the windows, but 
both are apparently 25 feet back from the start of the sterncastle. On top 
of that the sterncastle turret looks smaller on the deck plan than it does 
on the artwork.

What we really need is a set of 3d models (the very thing you are making). 
Does anyone have a copy of Pirates of Realmspace? Does that actually have 
any 3d ships in the game? Maybe we could get someone to hack into the game 
and extract the ship models.

> And you have the ship's living/storage space utterly dwarfed
> by the flukes and ram.
> http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/sj/squidship_2006_1.jpg
> to me, that's exactly how a squidship should be sized, about equal to real
> life merchantman/small manowar of the 1600s. The man on deck shows scale.

> So I'm screwed either way, all I can do is *interpret* the originals 
> because
> they are so glaringly wrong in many cases :(

Yep. Burn the heretic! ;-)

> But at least you like them :)

They look great. You realise you could avoid the "size debate" by designing 
your own ship(s). That way you could give it proportions that make sense to 
you, throw in some classic looking deckplans and give it a write up that 
fits in with whatever scale works for you. Although I don't think that would 
be as interesting for you (or us). Please keep plugging away.

David "Big Mac" Shepheard
Virtual Eclipse Role Playing Club
http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/virtualeclipselrp/links/d20_system_001071937434/Spelljammer_001071430476
http://www32.brinkster.com/virtualeclipse/