The gun carriage a millimetre and a half lower

It kept frustrating me that the guns came out so high in the port. So I went looking for a solution after all. In the end I set the axletrees a little deeper into the gun carriage. That drops the whole carriage by 1.5 mm. The quoin lets me adjust a bit more, but I didn’t want the barrels ending up at wildly different angles. So I tried it this way first.

Piet thought it looked good, and Hans reckoned I was now well on the right track and wouldn’t do much more to it. He added a bit of history. Sailing in line of battle there were two tactics: fire a bit high with a double, linked shot to smash the opponent’s masts and rigging, or fire low, preferably just below the waterline, to hole the ship. The latter made little sense if you wanted to capture the ship. The way the gun sits now, it can serve either purpose.

That’s how I keep learning. Frankly I know very little about it and mostly just follow the instructions as best I can. This sort of background helps me understand what I’m actually doing.