Talk:Ship model
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This article contains a lot of box characters and wicket characters. What are they supposed to be? -phma
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Despite the fact that some fine artists painted and sculpted masterpieces of architecture and the human and animal form, it seems that no truly representative drawings of ships seems to have survived. Most surviving pictures or engravings are apparently greatly out of scale, although like maps of that period, they were greatly decorated with drawings of real and imagined sea monsters, leaving the nautical historian very little to work with.
How does this work? I have seen some Medieval pictures of ships, and they were horribly distorted, with the crew greatly enlarged relative to the size of the ship - in short, like Medieval pictures in general, where importance is indicated by size. On the other hand, the Greek and Roman pictures found on pots and reliefs seem to be fairly realistic, and sizes are not nearly so problematic. Since these images also lack sea monsters, am I to take it that the above passage wasn't considering this era?
- The passage does say "most", but it would be useful to distinguish Greek/Roman representations, which are scaled reasonably, but for instance leave us mystified as to who sat where in triremes, from medieval pictures, which are just bad (oops, POV :-) ). Stan Shebs 02:44 Feb 18, 2003 (UTC)
There should be enough Greek and Roman pictures to counter the most. I was under the impression that the controversy over triremes stemmed almost entirely from a reluctance to believe in stacked oars, and that once the Olympias established the possibility, the controversy over whether they were used dried up. The larger galleys are still confusing, but they were cataphract, so the rowers shouldn't show up in the images anyways - though I'll agree the images aren't nearly as helpful as they should be in such matters. Btw, POV is fine in talk pages, and saying that Medieval pictures of ships suck is very close to an objective assessment.
There's one class of 'model ship' I miss here: the miniature ship model used in wargaming, like models of soldiers or vehicles that are used in table-top games. These ships are made of metal (pewter) and some assembly is required before painting them, but less than the wooden ship models in the article. Shouldn't there be a section for these ships? mover 23:55, 17 Oct 2003 (UTC)
- Go for it, they're certainly worth knowing about. Stan 00:07, 18 Oct 2003 (UTC)