I am creating this as a play aid for Jon Williams' game, Heart of Oak.
The rules are Copyright © 1978, 1983 by Jon Williams. They are published by Fantasy Games Unlimited, Inc.
If you are interested in obtaining the rules, Fantasy Games Unlimited, Inc. sells a PDF.
- Heart of Oak $10
- Privateers and Gentlemen $10
The Privateers and Gentlemen game includes a copy of the Heart of Oak rulebook. The quality of the scan seems to be a bit better.
If FGU's site isn't available, try these guys:
The Compass_Card__B+W.svg is CC BY-SA 3.0
I'm going to call almost anything that floats a ship, even though the rules treat vessels differently than ships.
The rules are for 1/1000 miniatures, so 1 millimeter on the table respresents 1 meter in the "real" world.
A turn represents 1 minute of time.
I am using a Cartesian coordinate system to place objects on the map. I'm going along with the scale in the rules, so each X and Y increment represents 1 millimeter.
The origin won't matter until we start mapping in terrain or depth.
Heading is something like the true direction that a ship is pointing. Again, I'm using a flat-Earth and ignoring the curvature of the Earth.
The rules represent heading using the Compass Rose.
This program uses
Measurements are from the main mast of the ship. I am using 64-bit floating point numbers for coordinates. According to Stack Overflow, that means we should be able to track objects 9,007,199,254,740,992 millimeters apart.
Bearing reference
Internally, we're using radians, but we convert to the Compass Rose when reporting bearing.
I think that's kind of nice, because it hides the truth from the player. It's the age of sail; we're using magnets for direction and best-guesses for bearings. It wouldn't be right to use the exact bearing (or range).
I have a concept of North, South, East, and West. For small scales, we can ignore the curvature of the Earth and assume:
- 0,1 is North of 0,0
- 1,0 is East of 0,0
- 0,-1 is South of 0,0
- -1, 0 is West of 0,0
That brings up a challenge reporting things to the player.
The program can say that HMS Speedy is at (0,0),
with a heading of NNE,
the current is pushing SSE at 2 knots,
the wind is from the SE at 7 knots,
and the El Gamo is to the NE at (55,55),
heading W at 8 knots.
Nice drawing.
#/media/File:Compass-rose-32-pt.svg){kind=link}
I am using the 1983 edition of the rulebook. I have not seen an official set of errata for the game.
This section will note the few typos I've found, plus any odd interpretations of the rules I've made.
See Glossary of Nautical Terms on the Wikipedia.
- The Wikipedia page
- Another Wikipedia page
- Fantasy Games Unlimited
- Board Game Geek review
- Math Is Fun article on converting Polar and Cartesian Coordinates
- Why do we use radians for polar coordinates rather than degrees?
- Why Radian Measure Makes Life Easier In Mathematics And Physics
- Compass Rose
- Spherical Geometry
- Bearing Angle
- Bearing Angle - Boat
The Compass Rose (Compass-rose-32-pt) picture is By JamesLucas - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0.