Artist's Conception of Zheng-He's Flagship

your take on things, while at variance with standard logic, never ceases to amuse.

The main reason against a worldwide flood (besides the obvious paucity of necessary hydraulics) is that theres no worldwide evidence of marine sediment as the top (and latest) layer. and where marine sediments occur at depth they correlate for relatively limited distances.However, I dont imagine that means anything to you.

ps, I just saw your dimensions. Such a ship would be smaller than a Great Lakes ore carrier by about a third.
I dont think anyone doubts that a wooden ship of 150 meters could be built. The longest clipper, The Roanaoke was about 110 meters. It was just no longer feasible to build Superships out of wood, since we had steel in 1905 , and the massive Ocean paddle wheelers , although smaller than the Roanoke , were already double hulled iron boats. So yer point about doubting the story of Noah, that has nothing to do with anything. I think the story of Noah and its predecessor stories are charming fables of the days when myth was all we had.

And, of course, not original with the Hebrews.

I think gungas going to start calling us evolutionistas.

Where the hell'd i put that AK?

By 1905 Erickson's screw had pretty much replaced the paddlewheel and the sail on the ocean. The paddlewheel remained popular as river transport pretty much until the late 20's.

The real death of sail was the efficiency of double, and then the triple, expansion steam engines that made transatlantic steam power profitable.

Until then (about 1880) the windjammers ruled. Huge steel hulled (6 to 8000 ton) sailing vessels carrying three and four 100 m tall masts that carried acres of sail.

As for Noah, just as you come out of Cumberland Maryland on I-70 there's a Noah museum where the Ark is being reproduced. It's worth a look, but it still doesn't answer where Noah found a platypus and a kangaroo in Iraq.

BTW Ocean paddlewheelers (aka the Great Eastern) faded pretty quickly. They had a severe crabbing problem in swells that made them hard to maneuver. Somehow they're remembered as an interesting transition (should I say evolution?) of naval drive.

Oh yeah, by 1900 Parson had invented the steam turbine---big and fast ships (destroyers and dreadnoughts) used the turbine hooked to two to four screws.

Nevertheless, IMO the cleanest sailing vessels of all time were Yankee clippers, Chesapeake Schooners, and Skipjacks.

Rap

Flying Cloud made the Golden Gate and picked up her pilot in 1854, 89 days and 8 hours after dropping her pilot at Sandy Hook (i.e., New York to San Francisco). Her master was Josiah Cressy, her navigator was Eleanor Cressy. The record was broken by the racing sloop Thursday's Child, in 1989--one hudred thirty-five years later.

No physical evidence of global flooding...

I mean, I keep reading that but what the hell are the loess and muck deposits all over whole continents then? I mean, what sort of uniformitarian process is going to cause that?

Statement from authority, with no authority adduced for it.

youre losing already gunga, loess is a soil that is wind deposited(aeolian) . Its located in interfluvial zones(between streams). A loess deposit is actually a dune , except with silt sized particles.
Muck is only a generic term meaning a wet soil, but it has no genesis implied.Any wetland of today has a muck soil, except we now call them hydric. For the record, about 90% of surficial Canada is overlain by various glacial moraines and surface gneissic bedrock. In the US , the aeolian soil surface covers about 75% of the land > Im giving you the other 25% as a gift but that part is further subdivided into very ancient fluvial, basin, shallow reef and beach deposits and includes the interbasins of the Rockies and Appalachians. Ill make you a bet, Ill let you draw me a mapline anywhere across anysection of the US, from border to border or sea to sea and Most of that random line will have been surfaced by aeolian soils and not marine deposits. Im only a mediocre stratigrapher and Ill still take your money.


I love when these threads go askew, rap, good info, I was comparing the length of the longest US Clipper (longest and slowest as it turned out) It was launched in 1892 and was built at the Bath Iron works(Maine) where today they still build the guided missile frigates. The Roanoke sailed till about 1910 in overseas trade. She was built way too late for the tea races that induced the building of the
Wild Pigeon or the Flying Cloud. Set neat painting , whos the artist?

One good reason why wooden ship do not get much beyond 100 meters in length, cavitation. The keel bows and an air bubble forms under it, robbing the ship of speed and making her difficult to handle.

beats hell outta me, FM, but i'll see if i can find out . . .


Sorry, came up with a blank, but here's another good one of Flying Cloud, by John Richard Perry, to whom the copyright . . .

And here's another beauty, by Charles Vickery, to whom the copyright . . .

Wow I came in this thread thinking "What the Hell is Zheng He doing in the science forum?". This definately wasn't what I expected either. Someone Zheng He proves.... Noah??

acquiunk. Probably thats why the Roanoke never made any speed records, it was busy crabbing and flexing.

Set -Ive seen the Vickery "Flying Cloud" painting but I was wondering if the name Charles Evers was on the first? Evers did many WWII battle pics and was famous for his seemingly moving waters. He did a bunch of Clippers in the tea races .
I really love that one what light and water. I copped it on "properties" and now it is mine.

I have recently read an excellent book on Flying Cloud, which i lent to a friend, who has it right now, so i'll be doing this off the top of my head. Flying Cloud was built in East Boston at the yard of Donald McKay. He was a dirt poor son of a hard-scrabble farmer and sometimes fisherman in New Brunswick, who emmigrated and arrived in Boston at age 15. He walked around looking for jobs until he found one at a local shipyard. The owner took a liking to him, and taught him the ship-building art, which it truly was, each ship being individually designed and built. McCay built some of the finest ships in his day, and commanded top dollar.

Flying Cloud was sold to a brokerage house for $50,000 (keep in mind, that was in 1851) before she was even run down the slipway. They in turn sold her to Grinnell, Minturn and Company, of New York, for $90,000, payment in full upon receipt in Boston harbor. That brockerage house (the name escapes me) had to be kicking themselves after she made a world record run to Frisco on her maiden voyage.

Grinnell, Minturn gave that voyage to Josiah Cressy (Kree-zee), one of their more successful and hard-driving ship's masters. His navigator was Eleanor Cressy, his wife. Her father had been a ship's master in Nantucket who had no sons, only the one girl. So he taught her dead reckoning, and when she reached adolescence, he taught her trigonometry and the full art of navigation. Ellie met Josiah Cressy when she was 25, and therefore considered unmarriagable. But he married her, and they sailed together for the rest of their professional lives, master and navigator.

Eleanor made the record run, and the later record run in 1854, by taking the Horn close-hauled, after wearing in the hours before dawn, so as to have all of the available daylight to make a fast run (it was hoped, the winds often blew from west to east) past the Horn. She pulled it off in grand style twice, in 1851, and 1854. Her record in 1851 was 89 days, 13 hours, and in 1854, 89 days, 8 hours. Grinnell, Minturn made a hell of a good dollar, too. At the height of the gold rush, eggs sold for a dollar a piece in San Francisco, and a barrel of salt pork went for $50. Additionally, the two record runs brought so many orders to Grinnell, Minturn that they could pick and choose the jobs they took.

I'd have been in heaven had i lived then.

The phenomenon which Acq describes--cavitation--was aggravated by the weight of the fore and mizzen masts and all of their sail and rigging. It was known as "hogging." I described it in more detail in the Frigate thread. There is a building method to significantly reduce hogging, but it was not used on most merchants, which were, literally, slow boats to China--in the tea trade. But the clippers, developed from the Baltimore clippers which were used as privateers in the war of 1812, were built soley for speed, and not cargo capacity--so they were built with the interior reinforcement which almost eliminated hogging. Making a record run to China could net a pretty profit, as the first tea cargo in could command top dollar. But the gold rush made people fabulously wealthy. It's end also brought about a near collapse in sailing merchants in speed runs, as it coincided with the rise of steam power. The smart money moved into railroads, and the shipyards in America which had built the clippers slowly declined--due both to the decline in orders, and the big shipbuilding industry in Canada, which, like Bath in Maine, was located on the water, right below the forests which supplied their materials. By 1865, Canada had the fourth largest merchant fleet in the world, and was second only to the United States in ship building.

Cool. I know that the favorite wood for the bigger keels was Osage Orange. A dense piss yellow colored fibrous wood that had the tensile strength of 316 stainless (not quite) As the Susquehanna was used for floating all the big hardwood timbers down to the Chesapeake, many of the smaller Delaware schooners just wide enough to pass through the C&D canal , would sail keel sections up to Bath . Osage was not a common wood North of NEw Jersey and old growth Osage was quickly cut down. By 1860s it was almost all gone in PA and NY, save a few special trees in Marylands western counties which were train hauled

Two of the last trees of the old growth Osage were cut down to make the keelson for the new Sultana , a fast Baltimore Clipper that is another repro ship like the "Pride of Balto II"

Set, I would also be in hog heaven . Both Mrs F and I love the open ocean even when it gets a little dicey.
Everything is in your hands and you spend long tiring hours in some choppy open water sections. Then when you can finally bunk after a long day or more, you dont need any assistance getting to sleep. However, I dont think Id wanna do the Horn in anything less than an aircraft carrier or a Russian Ice Breaker.

PS , you were talking about your "Frigate thread".