Wargame pieces

I finally made a tiny bit of progress towards having a new style of Dutch ship wargame piece. I started with a pencil drawing that I inked. I scanned it and put it into a Dutch ship sheet. I tried digitally adding color, but with the tools that I have, the time cost is prohibitive. I just copied it, pasted it, and printed. I will use colored pencils and rescan. Then I will have do some digital editing to put back what I will lose in the printing and scanning process. I started with a 120ft ship, as there were so many.

The right base and chase diameters for guns?

So I got my Smalltalk code for computing the weights of Dutch guns written and working, to a limited extent. One immediate issue that is really critical is how to choose appropriate chase and base diameters for a gun of a particular weight and shot weight. I am probably not using the correct terminology. My program needs the diameter of the gun at the muzzle end and the breech end. Both have rings that are of specific diameter. Naval guns generally flare to the muzzle, while army guns have a ring around the muzzle. The sizes determine how much metal is in the gun and there must have been design rules used by gun manufacturers that they had developed over time through experience and knowledge of what was common practice.

My current short project: program to calculate Dutch gun weight

My current short project is to write Smalltalk code to calculate Dutch gun weights, based on the volume of metal and density. I hope to be able to estimate the actual metal density used, once I get this working.

Nico Brinck's bronze 24pdr gun drawing

Nico Brinck gave me his bronze 24pdr gun drawing that shows a Dutch gun from 1632. This gun is 10.7 Amsterdam feet long, so that would mean that the guns are more lightly constructed than I have thought. Now, I go back to the spreadsheet and do some more adjusting.

Dutch gun analysis

I thought that after having some idea about Dutch gun weights, that I could apply my analysis tool to what I learned. The idea is to look at some basic relationships:

D^3 x L x K = gun weight in pounds

I had time this morning to try my hand at Dutch bronze 36pdr and 24pdr guns:

Material Shot wt Length (Ft)  Length (Cal.)  Gun Wt   K
bronze   36pdr   10ft         18.2           6635 lbs 1.2658
bronze   36pdr    9.5ft       17.3           6282 lbs 1.2608
bronze   24pdr    9.5ft       19.8           4879 lbs 1.2835
bronze   24pdr    8.75ft      18.2           4414 lbs 1.2634
bronze   24pdr    8.25ft      17.2           4171 lbs 1.2633

Heavily armed, relatively small Dutch ships

One phenomenon that has my interest is that of the numerous 120ft to 123ft long ship armed with 36 or 38 guns in 1652 and 1653. A prominent early example was the Zeeland ship Hollandia that served as Johan Evertsen's flagship for the first part of the war. Other examples include the Wapen van der Veere (38 guns), the Zevenwolden (38 guns), the Stad Groningen en Ommelanden (38 guns), the Leewarden (36 guns), the Monnikendam (36 or 38 guns), probably the Rotterdam Directors' ship Prins or Prins te Paard (38 guns), and the other Rotterdam Directors' ship Jonas, commanded by Jan Evertsz de Liefde up until August 1652.