But I drag myself out of the sack to produce the diagram included left. We suppose that A is an English ship of the line in a line of ships moving west and that B is a French ship of the line in another line moving north, all the ships in the two lines being more or less identical. The ships themselves might be 50 yards long but I have no idea how far apart they would be, one from another in the line. The two cones are the relevant fields of fire of ships A and B and we suppose that the angle alpha is around 25 degrees and that the distance beta is around 500 yards. I dare say extreme range was rather further but I remember that the general idea was so much the closer, so much the better. Provided, that is, that you could keep up a better fire than the other chap, which I believe was generally the case for us at that time: we got all the practice in while the French were bottled up (or skulked) in port.
Another general idea was that firing a broadside into the front or back of your opponent did a lot more damage than firing it into his side. I believe that at Trafalgar a number of enemy ships surrendered in just a few minutes, having in that time taken a couple of such broadsides, more or less smashing up the whole of their insides. Shock and awe 18th century style. Subsequent broadsides might get a bit more ragged.
To try and stop this happening one arranged one's ships of the the line in a line, thus making it hard for the enemy to get at your fronts and backs without exposing himself to your fire first.
However, if you were sufficiently aggressive you sailed your line straight at the other line, taking their fire at long range but surviving to smash them up at short range, as ship A is about to do to ship B in the diagram. Nelson, being small, very aggressive and very brave, took this one step further and split his fleet into two lines so as to break the Franco-Spanish line in two places, so breaking up the enemy fleet and making it possible for the superior English gunnery to smash it up good and proper.
Which is all very well but it seems to me that the success of the breaking the line tactic depends on the directions the two lines are sailing in, their speeds, the intervals between the ships, the quality of their gunnery (and gunpowder) and the direction (and quality. As I said before, Conrad was quite full of the trickiness of the winds around Cape Trafalgar in his memoirs) of the wind. One then needs to look at the way that ships are moving in and out of the fields of fire of their opponents and the chances of taking serious damage before inflicting serious damage. Perhaps one quiet day I will knock up a bit of VB in my trusty copy of Excel to model all this. I suspect that one could do quite well without needing to actually draw maps & pictures inside the computer; messing about with arrays of ships would be quite good enough.
Quite good enough to explain why the symmetrical starting position of two identical lines of ships sailing at each other at right angles has such an asymmetrical result, this being the source of much of the waking puzzlement.
PS 1: being picky, the cones representing the fields of fire are not really cones as the ships have more than one gun, occupying more than one position. The cones are really the sums of the 15 or so cones generated by the 50 or so guns on one side of a three decker battleship.
PS 2: would there be a market for a computer game based on the foregoing? It would make a change from all the Rambo stuff which I understand to be the staple. Would our teens have any interest in 18th century gunnery, so much more feeble and so much more bulky than the sort of thing we can do now?
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