Naval History & Technology - Need Advisors and Sources

Authoring Story Research and Design
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Hi there. I’m writing a game called The Manik, a fantasy but with early 20th century levels of technology. The game is set on a naval vessel (called The Manik; wow, the title of the game is the name of the ship), after some catastrophic event caused enough damage to start sinking it- Without the mainland knowing.

This is all well and good. It’s a fantasy story, realism isn’t strictly necessary. But I still have questions- How does naval radio communication work? Can someone really be promoted several ranks posthumously? If they “come back” to life, does that rank still hold? How do diesel powered steam ships work?

If there is anyone here with knowledge in these topics, or who has any resources that might be helpful, I’d like to talk to you or go through these. Other topics include notable mutinies in the 20th century, incidents involving sinking ships, maritime law regarding piracy and naval warfare, the effects of carbon monoxide poisoning in slowly increasing doses, and etcetera.

Also, in case you’re wondering how this is a fantasy story- I haven’t yet mentioned that in addition to engineers and mechanics, there are also sailors working as warlocks. Most of the technology, radios and such, operates with magic crystals, requiring the aid of someone in touch with mystical forces to maintain. The cannons aboard the Manik fire shells stuffed with shards of some reality warping crystals, which does horrible things to anything unlucky enough to be in it’s way. The vessel is fitted with Sealing Berths, which are like stasis chambers but magic because the liquid inside has dust that just sort of suspends biology inside. There are plenty of things going on in this game, story, and world that justify me calling it a fantasy, trust.

Work hard, play harder.

Thank you.

P.S. If this is a topic you’re interested in, there are documents from the Cartographic Branch (Record Group 19) of the National Archives on their website with engineering documents in microfilm and scanned form. And, Navsource is a website with LOTS of historical photographs, news clippings, paintings, and etcetera of notable Naval vessels from the USA and other nations. It’s very cool.

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I’m going to ping @Piergiorgio_d_errico in case he hasn’t seen this yet.

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Varied much in your level of technology: 1900s radios was different from 1930s ones, and the comm handling varied accordingly.

posthumous double promotions was customary in IJN (Imperial Japanese Navy), esp. after an heroic death, not necessarily related to the Divine Wind.

I must check (is a land war incident), but ISTR that at least one holdout was double-promoted, but dunno if was revoked when found alive, but for sure Japanese government always offers to honour the entire pay for the entire period of unusual active service (dunno about about the rank used in summing up the years, if not decades, of backpay…)

your description of your world’s magitech is akin to the one of the Trails series, minus the requirement of being “in touch” (I suppose that the latter is akin to the magitek of FF VI (6) )

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

ps. for Daniel; actually I was checking references when you pinged…

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The dottore is your deep expert here, but if you have questions about the legal side of things, I have a little bit of background there (I can tell you piracy = bad; the doctrine that pirates are enemies of all mankind, and every state has a duty to destroy them, is one of the oldest principles of international law).

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And this was a serious problem in the Bronze Age Mediterranean; the king of Alasiya (modern Cyprus) spent a lot of time trying to convince other local monarchs that his island was not aiding or harboring pirates, it was those damn Lukka (Lycian) peoples on the southern Anatolian coast, who ended up being a constant problem all the way through the Roman period (the Cilician pirates).

…unfortunately, if your game is set any time after the fall of the Roman empire, I’m much less help.

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It is probably worth pointing out that this is something that varied a great deal from navy to navy and evolved enormously over the course of the two world wars.

If you’re interested in a specific point in time then you can find US naval operations manuals that will get in the nuts and bolts of this sort of thing, with the advantage that they’re written in the expectation that the audience is someone with a high school education and no prior experience in the subject. I don’t know what other languages you can read but there are similar materials available for other navies.

With a lot of your questions I think you’ll probably have to whittle down what you’re looking for. The most famous (non-fictional) early 20th Century mutiny is probably the Potemkin mutiny but it’s difficult to contextualize without understanding the the Russo-Japanese War, the Sevastopol uprising and broader 1905 Russian Revolution, and so on. And if you want the “ground-level” details of what a mutiny was like you might be more interested in something like the (fictional) The Caine Mutiny (set during the Second World War) than a historical example.

The best non-fiction book about a historical mutiny I can think of off the top of my head is Batavia’s Graveyard, but it’s about a 17th Century mutiny, not an early 20th Century one. And one of the best books about historical shipwrecks I can think of at the moment is Druett’s Island of the Lost (the book, not the unrelated film) which is about two ships which (in the last 19th Century) suffered unrelated shipwrecks at nearly the same time on the same island mere miles from each other, with the two stranded crews dealing with the situation in wildly different ways and ending quite differently.

And you don’t specifically ask about it but if you want a general introduction to boat-y things for a lay audience The Nature of Boats is pretty good as a general primer. There are also a lot of good primary sources for different periods (like The Young Sea Officer’s Sheet Anchor as a guide to what a seaman in the late age of sail would be expected to know about practical seamanship, rigging, and so on) but “early 20th Century” covers a lot of technological development; the differences between how the just the US navy operated in 1939 and how they operated in 1945 is enough to fill a bookshelf.

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When I wrote Cargo Breach (set on a small cargo steam ship during WWI), I just Googled things as I needed them. One search term would typically unveil a handful of useful web sites, plus all the usual irrelevant dross that Google finds. These would often lead to other terms or concepts that needed to be researched.

Don’t get too obsessed with all the technical minutae, as players won’t be interested in that. Keep it high level. In my case (from memory), the radio was just a radio and the ship’s engine room only gave the bare minimum details, so as not to distract the player from the game’s objective.

I also Googled cargo steam ship plans from the period and this was very useful to determine the layout of the decks and the location of things like the cranes and cargo holds.

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Back on the radio and maritime/Naval comms in general… in 1900s and 10s the shipboard radio system was rather simple, and, most important, there was no direction-finding (suffice to say that the wreck of the Titanic wasn’t exactly in the position broadcasted in the historical CQD, absolving the Californian from its “failure”) which was invented by Bellini and Tosi in 1909, but became standard equipment in the 20s, when perfected with the adcock antenna and il Bepi’s “balun”, but suffer until late 30s/early WWII by the uncertainly between the direction and its reciprocal (meaning, what was actually found was the axis of direction, not the bearing, of the signal, hence the usage of two or more ship in elongated battleline or line of bearing during RDF sweep operation during WWII)
On top of this, up to 1920s the tuning operation was complex (involving three dials instead of one) and wasn’t precise in both trasmission and reception, leading to few, well-separated in frequency, channels available for maritime/Naval comms, when mutual interference between stations don’t raise its ugly head (side point, even today with the vast knowledge of radio waves and powerful computing power, establishing the layout of the antennae aboard a warship, without mutual interference, is still a “black art”)

So, perhaps the suggestion of Garry is good; I must note that a Ship, more so a Warship, is run thru mutual trust between crewmembers (an old Chief pointed to me that the best ship is the one “without discipline”, meaning that everyone aboard know exactly what to do, without many orders (think about USMC’s “silent drill”: a complex 100+ movements drill done with only the order to initiate the drill…)), so perhaps your PC can trust his fellow “magician-sailors”, allowing his approach to the ship’s gizmos.

of course, I’m available for narrowing the “techno-magical timeframe” of your story.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Haha yeah… Yeah, those guys? Yeah they uh, they started it. Some plot happened and they sort of, yeah.

How kid of you to think I do this to appease anyone but myself. but yeah this is a thing that i’ve had trouble with; At a certain point, I know that nobody will mind. However. I have ADD. I wanna know how radio works before I say certain things. I mostly wanna know for my own sake.

Like, I’m pretty sure driving a sword into a shipboard radio system is going to break it. I don’t need to do much research to understand that.

That’s the plan. I’m just wondering if anyone here had anything handy.

Thank you.

And some of these things I’m more interested in knowing for precedent, such as the posthumous promotion. I can always just write that in, but knowing how it is handled in the real world can help.

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@Piergiorgio_d_errico O the topic of this, would you mind if I DMed you? I might ask about other completely unrelated things out of curiosity, ut I do have some pointed questions.

Sorry a couple keys o my keyoard are borked

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Ad some info on this if you do’t mid- What is the attitude of most militaries on pirates? If they had to, would they make concessions to a pirate, or a large group of?

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ThisKobold: yes, feel free to send PM on your questions.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Learning weird facts is always good for game design! It’s a great source of inspiration, and also helps your game feel less generic, since it’s drawing on specific information like this. It’s a bit embarrassing how much Return of the Obra Dinn taught me about the layout of ships from that era and how they worked, which led to Death on the Stormrider.

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This is hard to generalize from, I think? The law is the law – state navies have a right, if not an obligation, to eradicate pirates and piracy, due to the threats they pose to maritime traffic as a whole. But in practice, that’s going to be less meaningful than specifics like the relative balance of force between the people doing the negotiating, the cultural difference between them, and the perceived alignment or misalignment of their interests.

This is especially the case where there’s fuzziness between piracy and privateering; I don’t roll super deep in the so-called Golden Age of Piracy, but my understanding is that the British Navy did engage in a fair bit of negotiation, including offers of amnesty, with some of the larger-scale pirate formations in the Caribbean, but in that case many of the pirates were themselves British sailors, and preyed on the shipping of Britain’s enemies in either formal (i.e. privateering) or informal fashion. On the flip side, the modern US Navy is not especially sympathetic to Somali pirates!

One overall trend to consider is that as state capacity increases, the upside for states to turn a blind eye to piracy that may advance their interests starts to decrease; in most circumstances they’ve got the ability to deploy their power more directly, instead of relying on unreliable agents, while the economic gains from free traffic over the seas are getting much larger relative to the foreign policy gains of disrupting an enemy’s shipping. Meanwhile, the hit to legitimacy from tolerating a gap in the state monopoly on force can get substantial. So where toleration and loose cooperation might be more likely in 17th or 18th century type milieus, by the 20th century the trend would be much more in the other direction (at least in the more-developed parts of the world). You mention technology in your setting is WWI-ish, so that’s maybe a place to start, but of course there’s no necessary reason why state capacity and consolidation would be on the exact same trajectory as technological development.

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Also—at least, this was a serious problem in the ancient world, but I have to imagine it applies in modern times too—if your country gets a reputation as a place that’s not safe for traders, suddenly you’re going to have a lot of trouble importing the things you need. So it’s in your best interests to deal with the piracy problem in whatever way you can, whether that’s driving them off with your navy or paying them off to go extort someone else instead. Rome at its peak, for example, needed to import hundreds of tons of grain per day to feed the city’s population, and anything that got in the way of that was a top-priority emergency.

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Kinda.

I think it’s important to distinguish between the Royal Navy—which never so far as I know negotiated with pirates in any sense—and the actions of the Crown—who issued periodic proclamations offering general pardons for acts of piracy committed between given dates, to pirates willing to turn themselves in to authorities—and Royal Governors—who would be the ones accepting any such surrenders and had broad latitude in accepting or rejecting petitions and in deciding which acts were included or excluded from pardon.

As far as I know the Royal (or any other) navy really didn’t do anything other than attempt to eradicate piracy whenever and wherever it could. And the periodic proclamations by the King(s) extending pardons (like the Acts of Grace) were really more aimed at “rank and file” pirates rather than the most notorious—who may have been excluded from amnesty by name (William Kidd being probably the most famous example).

And really the only “pirate formations” in any meaningful sense (as in operating as a naval squadron, as opposed to a ship or two operating together as a result of some personal negotiation by the pirates involved) were the Dutch, who during the Eighty Years War kinda sprinkled letters of marque and reprisal around the Carribean the way a greasy spoon salts its fries. A strategy which by many measures succeeded spectacularly—Dutch Admiral and sometime privateer Piet Hein commanded a squadron of thirdy-odd ships at the Bay of Matanzas in the most successful single action against a Spanish treasure fleet ever attempted. But that sort of thing was, by the standards of the time, a legitimate action per cruiser/prize rules rather than an act of piracy. And so wouldn’t be covered by anything like the Acts of Grace (even if the belligerents in question weren’t Dutch and Spanish).

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The Tudor Navy was somewhat borderline between the proto-RN and a pirate fleet (notice that a customary provision of letters of marque is that 50% of the booty goes to the issuing Crown…) and one can even call Drake’s fleet against the Armada the largest pirate fleet ever since antiquity (Roman Navy also fought set-piece battles against pirate fleets…)

Another pirate fleet can be considered that of Ruggiero di Lauria, but there’s substantial doubts is if was an early instance of “commerce warfare” in the Mahanian sense.

but by the timeframe of reference of our original poster, commerce warfare was fought by Naval ships, esp. germans, both Kaiserliche marine and Kriegsmarine (Emden, the first and second Scharnhornst and Gneisenau, and especially the trio of “pocket battleships”, built with this mission in mind) I suggest that our Kobold looks up these ships…

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Well, the Spanish considered Drake a pirate, but they (as is the frequent custom) had a tendency to characterize any privateers that attacked their shipping as pirates.

There’s a legalistic case to made for calling Piet Hein a pirate (as the Spanish didn’t recognize the Dutch as a sovereign entity; that after all being one of the principle issues of contention in the Eighty Years War) but you really have to squint at it to make Drake a pirate. Really the main argument is that the English and the Spanish weren’t formally engaged in a declared war, but that certainly didn’t stop the Spain from having a go at the English at any opportunity, for example.