We often forget how slow ship movements were back in those days. When we look at (or play) the Battle of Trafalgar, as shown below, we forget that the closing speed of Nelson's two columns was at a walking speed. At 6am Nelson formed his two columns, 11:30am Nelson sends his famous signal to the fleet, and it's another 1 3/4 hours before Victory gets into the fight, and another few hours before the two fleets are fully entwined in battle.
Indeed - and this has interesting implications for any attempt to represent it in a game which doesn't take the whole day. If you want the outcome of a given manoeuvre to remain the same, you have a few options:
1) Increase rate of fire and speed, keep damage the same.
This is true to life but
looks wrong - rapid fire cannons seem to do no damage at all.
2) Increase speed and damage, keep ROF the same.
This presents an ahistorical picture of ships being very fragile, and means that a situation where ships could historically get off a broadside they can in-game not have the time to reload.
3) Give up, portray ships as motorboats which go faster downwind, make up the damage and fire rate numbers.
Not ideal.
The same happens with games that simulate ironclad-era battles - the 15" gun on a late model Monitor fired once every quarter hour or less and would punch a ragged hole two feet across in an enemy ship, but the heavy guns on a more reasonably armed ship fire nearly twenty times as fast. (I worked this out recently - in the time between USS
Monitor firing her first and second shots with each of her two cannons, the
Warrior would be able to fire about two hundred 68-lber shot and eighty 7" shells with each broadside... so if the
Monitor's gun fired once a minute in the game, the
Warrior would look like a demented machine gun.)