Race Built Galleons - Question

[sidewheeler]

Maybe I'm wrong, but the design of the Race Built Galleon in this game looks a bit oldschool for the 18th century. That high, angled sterncastle and lateen-rigged mizzen mast look more like the 16th/early 17th century to my eyes. The game says that all ship plans were provided by the National Maritime Museum of London, so I assume it's an authentic design. Are these vessels just supposed to represent older ships being used by pirates past their normal service life, or were ships like that still being built in the 1700s?

[Alwyn]

Welcome to TWC, sidewheeler! I agree that Race Built Galleons look old-school. I don't know of any ships built to that design in the 1700s. While I could be wrong, I imagine you're right that they represent older ships used by pirates beyond their normal service life. If I remember correctly, some British privateers used race-built galleons, and the main difference between

I can see both sides of this. While this design seems too old, I like seeing different ships designs appearing. Also, the race-built galleon seems to have the right characteristics for a pirate ship, which would need to be fast enough to catch its prey and sufficiently well-armed to defeat it. Fluyts were built in the 1700s, they seem somewhat similar (but larger) and they have similar characteristics (faster and better-armed than an ordinary merchant ship). Maybe we could think of the race-built galleons in the game as small fluyts?

[Sar1n]

Not everyone adopted new trends quickly. Smaller shipyards that weren't yet fitted with drydock long enough to build a frigate hull of sufficient capacity might build light galleons into early 1700's.

One problem with ETW is that CA settled on late 18th century designs for most classes, with few legacy 17th century designs, like fluyt or galleons. Wile in reality, early 1700's designs were somewhere between full ship rigging and galleon style, something like this: