Royal Louis 1692

Tangency Press Essay 1 P-Note 1

Taras Pevny

P-NOTES FIGURE 1. Draft of the 1692 three deck 112-gun Royal Louis built

by François Coulomb in Toulon. This copy is preserved in the archives 

of the Danish Admiralty. (After Anderson 1942:Plate 1)

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P-NOTES FIGURE 2. Body plan detail from the draft of the Royal Louis.

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Richard Barker brought to my attention another early example of a French draft with design diagonals that was first reproduced in The Mariner's Mirror (Anderson 1942: Plate 1). Preserved in the Danish Admiralty archives, it is a copy of a French draft of the three deck 112-gun Royal Louis of 1692 built by François Coulomb in Toulon...

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La Belle's Design

"Capturing the Curve: The underlying concepts 

in the design of La Belle (1684)"
Tangency Press Essay 1 
Taras Pevny

FIGURE 1. Isometric drawing of La Belle's hull remains with every third

frame depicted and battens positioned along the design marks.

(Illustration by T. Pevny)

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Occasionally the archaeological ship reconstructor is fortunate enough to encounter the remains of a vessel on which shipwrights' design marks have been preserved. La Belle has the most extensive and complete set of such marks documented to date. The distinguishing features of the distribution, number, and placement of La Belle's surmarks associate it with a graphic design system of "geometric fairing with diagonals" which was in use in French shipbuilding in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries...  READ MORE

Welcome to Tangency Press

Tangency Press & Perpetual Publishing 
Taras Pevny

First, a very warm welcome to the Tangency Press blog.

Tangency Press was created to post and share working papers on the history of ship design and construction. It was specifically designed to facilitate publishing papers on archaeological ship reconstruction that often incorporate numerous graphics that need to be viewed at a fairly large scale.

Archaeological ship reconstruction is a fairly recent and rapidly expanding field with a steady inflow of new information from archaeological and historical sources. Reconstruction work needs constant reassessment, and this need was the direct motivation for creating a P-Pub (Perpetual-Publishing) format that enables referable notes (P-Notes) with images and sources to be added to the main work at any time in the future.

The essays, notes and reviews published on tangencypress.com will be linked to posts on this blog. I am absolutely convinced that ship reconstruction benefits greatly from the exchange of information and insights. Therefore, please feel free to post your comments, questions, corrections, advice and the like. Opinions will be respected and any integrated input whatsoever will be credited in a referable manner.