>> The Artmali shipbuilding survives in Fonrit and does not use >> double-hulls for its warsails or merchant ships. (The RuneQuest stats >> for the Warsail surely would have mentioned that fact...)
Greg Stafford:
> YGWV
> For me, the Artmali did NOT use outriggers.
> Nor is any of their naval tradition extant.
Then where did the Kareeshtan Warsail, aka War Yacht, come from?
The ship type was known in the Imperial Age (although the date for the sea battle of Koraru Bay and Dumanaba - 1077 - is post-Closing), and I suspect that the inland dwellers under Garangordos did not bring their own naval tradition. Neither did they adopt the outrigger from the Thinokans, so I suspect they "inherited" another tradition of shipbuilding.
Hmm. The Pithdarans (originally from inland Pamaltela) passed through the region before Garangordos (during the Gbaji Wars), and outfitted an ocean-crossing fleet that ended up seven generations late in Seshnela. They don't seem to have used the reed river-boats known in Jolar, so they too appear to have adopted some shipbuilding technology.
> They had weird flying/sailing on moon beam ships made of metal.
I like that. Still some excuse to have multiple sails to catch the moonlight in...
Probably some material they brought down from the moon - something like the qa-metal of the Blue Moon trolls.
Theirs was the moon of the tides, so maybe they used some attraction of water, too..
Did they maintain the technology/magic throughout the Storm Age? They started a great empire with naval activities reaching to Thinobutu/Sharzu/..., and probably warred against other navies of that time. In the Fonrit region, they probably fought the Vadeli (at that time having an even larger empire). There, and elsewhere, they appear to have raided like the wolf pirates. The antigods of Duravan seem to have respected the Artmali raiders (which would not have kept them from fighting each other).
Both the Vadeli Empire (drowned when the Spike imploded) and the Artmali Empire (burnt when fire spilled into the Nargan Sea) perished at the end of the Storm Age. Did the Artmali and Vadeli Empires meet in battle, or just in raids?
Overall, I'd like to expand on the weirdness of Storm Age navies.
The Waertagi won't have changed much.
The Helerings had ships of solidified clouds (to start with). Later on their descendants would have used weak mundane copies of those designs, so what could have been the carry-over?
(Sails, possibly multiple sails, for one thing...)
The (Red and Blue) Vadeli of the Storm Age possibly had a warfleet quite different from the merchant ships the Brown Vadeli used after the Opening. Somehow I envison bizarre spiked galleys, with towers for spell casting, siege engines shooting grapples, spears, shrapnell or fire, corvus-like boarding bridges, and nasty blade-like rams and keels that could be used on sea creatures and ships alike. Like Melnibonean ships...
However, the Waertagi are said to have ruled the Western seas, and at a time the Vadeli relied on the Awesome Bridge to connect the two main islands of their kingdom. Later, the region fell dry, then was drowned when Zzabur destroyed the Spike. It appears that they were quite unconcerned about the southwestern seas, and mostly stuck to the Neliomi and the western ocean when the Togaran, Helering and probably other navies harried Danmalastan.
The Antigods had (and still have) several navies. There might be similarities to the troll galleys of Jrustela and Kethaela, or otherwise bizarre things like the Vadeli warfleet I fantasized about above. Maybe some double-hulled designs, too (although Haragalan and Mokatan ships are single-hull constructions).
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