I don't plan to use this galleon in combat against modern battleships unless someone really wanted to... that'd be a weird anachronism
heh... It's too large of a scale anyways (1/36) But I want to either build a second sailing ship or find someone with one close to my scale and stage sea battles from the 16-1700's.
I am just building this ship for fun, if I suck at sailing it at first then I guess I will just have to improve. I have quite a few rigging diagrams relevant to the period which I have designed RC versions of, so I trust if I can get my hands on some cheap servos I'll have at least a working sail plan and rudder to learn with.
This hull design is very stable and I believe that as long as I don't run broad reach at full sail with all the gunports open in a gale I should be safe from trouble. Of course I need to find a better pond for trials, the one I use now is freakishly deep and I have lost a boat to it already.
In response to your concern about it exploding or catching other ships on fire, this ship has no magazine to detonate when struck, although a smoke bomb and trigger plate could be incorporated to simulate this effect. The interior of the gundecks are going to be sprayed with a fire-resistant coating. I suppose that if the pyrotechnic cannons were used for simulated combat, at close range they might catch another ship's sails on fire.
I am planning to implement homemade CO2 cannon banks with talcum powder that can fire more than once, and that would provide hundreds of shots assuming I could get about thirty-forty barrels to function. This would require, I think, banks of five to ten cannons that would fire simultaneously from the same accumulator tank. This may take a while to build though, as I am mainly focusing in the hull right now.
I am just as interested in the modern battleships you guys build for combat, but I don't know of anybody who does it near Windsor, Ontario. I have heard of the Ontario Attack Force, but not around Windsor. I like the sound of battleships, cruisers and destroyers, but I would really like to build a combat submarine or U-Boat with a working periscope system. That would just be cool, lying in wait undetected in the murky water and torpedoing anyone who strays to near... But I know that a static diving sub with torpedoes would cost thousands of dollars to build, so for now that is just a dream.
Here's a pic of a half-model that I found on google pics that looks like the same type of galleon that I am building. I could technically try to go this far in detailing the interiors but I probably wouldn't want it to get damaged in combat if I put that much work into it.