Ship's speed

[Tadeus]

Hi guys,

I'm about to gather some mechanics for the sanboxy part of S&S and would like to know where I can find the distance a standard sailing ship can cross in a day.

There is a chart for the speed of a sailing ship on the PRD but it looks like it's connected to the old vehicle rules - in the new ones from the S&S Player Guide they changed the speed and other stats of a sailing ship.

In the additional rules section of the PRD there is a table for calculating distance based on speed, but it's for creatures running/walking on land.

To make it short. What's the distance a ship with a speed of 90ft can cross in 12h or 24h?

[ferrinwulf]

As far as I can see the new distances have not been calculated yet. The corebook and PRD both say 48 miles a day (24hours). Ultimate Equipment (as its the newest I might go with this) says 2miles an hour for a sailing ship so it looks like it hasn't changed (24 miles 12 hours, 48 miles 24 hours).

I'm still not sure how to deal with ship tarvel per day myself though. We go with 12 hours per day with 20 or less crew and anchor over night (Surley you need at least 10 crew at night for the night shift so if you halfed the crew it would casue you problems during the day, hence the need to rest overnight). The when we reached 30 crew or more we had a skeleton watch at night with 10 crew min and could travel the 48 miles.

If you are doing the sandbox maybe divide all the maps into 50 mile squares and round it up to 50miles a day travel maybe (I divided the maps into 100mile squares, kind of wished now I had used 50mile squares now though).

[Robert G. McCreary]

The ship speeds presented in the Skull & Shackles Player's Guide are tactical speeds, used in ship-to-ship combat.

From the Skull & Shackles Player's Guide, page 10:

Skull & Shackles Player's Guide wrote:

Waterborne Movement: Travel over long distances across seas or oceans uses waterborne movement, measured in miles per hour or day. For muscle-propelled ships, a day represents 10 hours of rowing. For a wind-propelled sailing ship, it represents 24 hours. Waterborne speeds for the most common ship types can be found on page 174 of the Core Rulebook or in the individual ship stat blocks beginning on page 23.

So a sailing ship is assumed to be able to sail for 24 hours, and travel an average of 48 miles in that time. If you only sail for 12 hours, you can travel 24 miles.

For new ship types listed in the Player's Guide, simply compare their maximum speeds to the ships in the Core Rulebook. For example, a junk has a (wind-propelled) maximum speed of 90 feet, the same as a sailing ship, so its waterborne movement is the same, i.e., 48 miles per day.