Talk:One-Mast Ship

Article Name
I'm not entirely happy with the name of this article. "One-Mast Ship" may be descriptive, but it's not a real ship class, and it looks odd when compared to the Frigate article. I'm not even sure a seperate article is necessary, but if it is, the ships of Ultima VII and Serpent Isle resemble longships more than anything. I suppose they could be cogs, though? If they are longships, then they are definitely designed for rowing, so that'd need to be changed/removed. I'm not sure - does anyone else have an opinion? --Warder Dragon 00:16, August 11, 2010 (UTC)


 * To elaborate, I'm not sure a seperate article is necessary because I'm not sure the ships of Ultima VII are meant to be different from the ships of the earlier Ultimas. Yes, they have only have one mast, but the frigates of past Ultimas had two masts, whereas real frigates have three, which makes the in-game representation flawed from the start. --Warder Dragon 00:21, August 11, 2010 (UTC)


 * Yeah, but still, they are clearly not frigates, so I can't put them under that label. However, I'm open to changes if you have a better name for them.--Tribun 00:37, August 11, 2010 (UTC)


 * Wouldn't a better name just be "Ship"? That seems to be what NPCs call them, and makes sense with "a Ship" vs. "a Frigate". --Browncoat Jayson 13:19, August 11, 2010 (UTC)

Late to the discussion here, but I have to agree with Warder. Apart from the arbitrarily conceived article title, I just don't think the ships in U7/SI are meant to be taken literally as a different class of vessel. They were probably drawn that way for simplicity's sake; having full-scale frigates in the U7 engine would have been kind of ridiculous from a technical standpoint. Even the article's own trivia, which mentions an apparent disparity between the ship in the SI intro versus in-game, is indicative of this (i.e. the intro ship is the intended depiction). To further illustrate this point, the SI cluebook also mentions the Arabella as having longboats and cabins below-deck.

Furthermore, the whole premise of cost-saving measures is purely superfluous. Apart from the dubiousness of shoehorning an in-game justification for a technical limitation, frugality would seem rather incongruous for what was meant to be an unprecedented period of prosperity in Britannia.

I think this article should be merged with Frigates. To me, it doesn't make much sense to have it separate, and "Ships" already redirects there anyway. I'd be guessing the average reader would expect to find information about U7 ships there; who on earth is going to know to search for "One-Mast Ship"? --Terilem 19:04, 25 August 2011 (PDT)