Machinery on ship

[SekoETC]

I doubt it. I tried using a waterskin on a boat and it didn't work. Saltwater ain't good enough.

[T-shirt]

Fresh water is hard to come by at sea. Plenty of shipwrecked people who dehydrated at sea. On lakes (fresh water lakes) water should be available.

[sanchez]

I've been working on an idea for a solar still, but at best it would be very inefficient.

[Gor Mar]

I agree we need drying racks on ships
Think about the realism:
get fish
dry fish
sell fish
Doesn't that make enough sence?

[CrashBlizz]

Floating towns do exist at the moment. One of my characters has started one several years ago.

He has a galleon and several smaller ships docked to it for rooms and such.

Only probelm is their now lost at sea....

[Smellfungus]

Lost at sea? For how long? What are they doing about food? You might want to implement rationing, like stockpiling all the food and only giving people food once every two days, to make it last longer. That's an idea that's been floating around in my head for some time but I've never had a cause to use it. (luckily!)

[CrashBlizz]

another good food saving tip - hide it all until everyone else dies of starvation

[Smellfungus]

My, that's villainous! A whole community sacrificed for the minority.

[CrashBlizz]

......cancel that. By some strange chance land has just this second appeared on the map.

We're saved.

So back to topic, floating towns do exist and can be successful despite the fact many things can't be built on them. As long as careful planning goes into what to do when at port when the machines are avaialbe that is.

[Smellfungus]

So my brilliant food-economising plan still wont be implemented... Oh, I can practically feel my brain essence leaking away into pointlessness.

[MakeBeliever]

I've been thinking loads about sailing recently, mainly because i now have a few on huge boats. Many of which stand there bored stupid apart from repairs, even when they have cabins and a cargo hold full of resourses. There just isn't much they can do aboard the boat. Wouldn't it be great even if they could make a fishing rod to catch maybe 10g a day. At least they would be doing something and it wouldn't be that much catching enough to keep them at sea forever because they would have to eventually land to get food and fuels to cook with albeit dung, wood or coal.
There is small wooden fishing nets to be made, but you can't place them on big boats, so it's not even worth getting the resin and such for the sailors.
We need more things that they can do aboard to stop the boredom creeping in on long journeys and deep sea travels. There is only basic machines to build aboard. No Anvils, so no work bench's so no metalworking can be achieved even if they have smelter and table. I know they are just wooden ships but the bigger boats do have steel and iron, so there has to be a safe way of working aboard. They can't build a kiln to make some pottery but they can build ovens, it's just a little crazy. I know quite a few things have been stopped to prevent communities at sea, but honestly the poor sailors do have such boring trips. Even when you have the most sociable of sailors and traders that stop at most towns and ports, they are still bored stupid sailing when they are pretty wealthy in resourses. I'm sure if they were able to do more things aboard it would stop the death rate of boredom while sailing. It would also help them to travel more to way distant lands to get resourses for the islands back home without crew dying off through the bordom of sailing alone. It's not unitl you have character in those positions when it really sinks in just how little they can achieve work wise while sailing.

[miirkaelisaar]

Just wondering, can someone give me a list of all things you can build on a ship and/or in cabins or holds? A little bummed that it seems simple little things like a millstone or drying rack probably can't be built but might as well find out what I can build. Thanks.

[Snickie]

Building a drying rack on a ship seems pointless to me because you're on the ocean, in the sun. Constant evaporation means the air is humid, which is counterproductive to drying.

[madfish]

Who says it's always sunny on the cantr seas?

And millstones are huge. Why would you build a millstone on a ship?

[miirkaelisaar]

Ships are huge. Nowadays you can land jets on a ship. Cantr ships aren't that big but still. Maybe a millstone's too big, but there should be something you can grind things with that's not too big for a ship. IRL, couldn't someone built a millstone that was the size of a small car and not enormous? The concept is grinding two stones together by turning them, you should be able to take smaller stones still large enough to crush finely, and put them together, and just have smaller projects that are much less efficient. At least if someone was out of food and still had wheat they'd have some way to refine it and make food, even if it wasn't efficient. I'm not sure if the manual grain grinder is the same concept or not, but if that's small it would make sense to be able to put it on a ship =\