I use all brands and scales of Napoleonic ships. There were no significant differences in hull construction between the two periods, and only a few minor detail differences that you can see:
- The rear driver sail was now an irregular quadrilateral, but it ended inside the poop rail and only extended as far forward as the mizzen mast. In the SYW the driver was a full lateen sail; in the Napoleonic Wars it was a spanker that extended past the poop rail on two spars (the gaff above and the boom below). In the AWI, it was midway through the conversion, basically a lateen sail with the front triangle cut off and the new vertical edge attached to the mizzen mast. In the AWI the upper spar was usually still a full-length lateen-sized spar, but it only had a sail hanging off the rear half past the mizzen mast; there was no lower spar, the sail just attached at the rear bottom corner to somewhere in the vicinity of the poop rail.
- National flags flew from poles sprouting from the stern. In the Napoleonic era, the national flags usually flew from a line between the spanker gaff and spanker boom (or poop rail).
What this means: you can convert any Napoleonic 3-masted man-o-war into an AWI man-o-war by shortening the driver sail, replacing the spanker gaff with a double-length spar centered on the mizzen mast, and putting a national flag into the poop deck. Zoom in on the
Barfleur and
Ville de Paris in this painting to see the flagpole, short driver sail, and long driver spar that I'm talking about:
The main differences in hulls were in classes of warship in common use. Some ship types were very familiar: the 74 was already the standard two-decker ship of the line by the AWI era, the French had recently developed the two-decker 80 and built a bunch of them (mostly as flaships), and three-deckers were already commonly 90, 98, or 100 guns, with a few exceptional ships already around (e.g. Ville de Paris 104, Santissima Trinidad 112). However, there were more 64s in use as standard ships of the line in all the major navies, ship sizes like 66s and 72s and 76s and 78s were common in Dutch and Baltic service, and many AWI battlelines had a 50 or two in them, right up until 1783 (it was the AWI that taught the naval establishment that 50s were too small to be in the line). On foreign stations, the major navies also had a few two-decker 44s; these had disappeared by the Napoleonnic Wars.
Almost all of the smaller ship classes you can find in the Napoleonic Wars already existed in the AWI: cutters, snows, schooners, topsail schooners, brigantines, ship sloops, brig sloops, xebecs, bombs… you name it.
For my 1/2400 fleets, I just used Napoleonic ships straight out of the box. Really, I'm the only one who knows the driver sails are too long, and at that scale it doesn't make much difference anyway.
I have converted a few 1/1200 ships to long driver spars and stern flagpoles, and will probably do more if I ever resume AWI naval gaming.
- Ix
ponders nirvana.
