My setting has a sea dragon allied empire...

Why would sea dragons need to land on a boat?

Meant to type just dragons. My by brain insisted on adding sea apparently.

You can go Eberron and say your steamers are powered by bound fire elementals, thus retaining a modicum of fantasy bullshit

Warhammer dreadfleet had pic related, but it's not like they cared about plausibility.

Have a sail-less landing platform being pulled by pilot ships or creatures?
Or just sail-less ships, but that would be shitty for a navy.

If boats pulled by sea monsters isn't too fantasy for your setting, maybe that. Maybe with a draconic sea variant?

Just have a few airships with massive decks swung to one side off the center of the craft for the dragon to rest on, you can even have dragon breath fire into the furnace to keep it floating.

Generally in anime, illustrations, movies and whatnot dragons don't really need to have.... a landing strip? to take flight. That's inspired by our birds: even the bigger ones can take flight standing where they are. It's true that condors prefer to jump from heights, and bigger swans use water to brake themselves, but still.

Which might be pretty unrealistic, but, welll, we're talking about magic flying fire-breathing hexapod 30m lizards with an attitude for stealing gold. Hell, in fiction biggest problem would be to have the dragon NOT burn the whole fleet for the slightest misunderstanding.

In any case I dunno, I'd suppose a dragon could use water to brake itselft like a sea plane. At the very most I would it would need relatively calm waters. How about a wizard with a spell tha does that around the ship? I supposed one could prepare some floating breakwaters made of wood and whatnot if the ship has stopped, but...

So... Maybe a bridge just for take off if on land they need to rund to take flight? But what exactly are we supposed to use? A biggass slinghshot sounds retarded as hell.

Multihull ships, a là polynesians. That wouldn't be the issue.

>Multihull ships, a là polynesians.

I wonder if it would be possible to build a SWATH vessel with wood?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-waterplane-area_twin_hull

How big are your dragons?
How do they take off? (Do they need a running start, or do they just kinda leap into the air & start flapping their wings?)
How do they land?

As Anons pointed out, sailing ships with a length of ~80m are possible, albeit "very" large for a pre-modern seting.

If dragons can just leap into the air and start flying, it should be reasonably possible to order the masts on your sailing ship in such a fashion that a dragon can fit in between (or multiple ones, depending on their size). I.E.: bow, a couple of masts, dragon TO/L platform, couple more masts, stern. Or just like a helicopter landing platform on any semi-modern warship - think frigates or destroyers.

If dragons need a running start, setting up your masts like might be necessary, however you will run into a couple of problems. In this case, dragons probably need a running start because their wings work like airplane wings. This however leads to a dilemma: in order to maximize takeoff efficiency (and thus shorten runway length) the ship needs to be turned into the wind ( = the wind comes from the front) and moving as fast as possible - so that the air is flowing over the wings the "right way". If for instance, your ship is making 10 knots (reasonable for a sailing ship), the wind is blowing at 15 knots, and the dragon runs at 25nm/h, its airspeed is in fact 50 knots. For comparison, thats just abit lower than a Cessna's takeoff speed.

There is two problems with this: a) a sailing ship cannot possibly sail straight into the wind for any amount of time (this could be circumvented by some radical maneuvering) and b) the dragon cannot land the same way. For landing, the same principles apply: airspeed = ground speed + wind speed, and the faster the ship (and thus the runway) is moving (in the same direction as the dragon), the shorter the neccessary runway.

(cont.)
The problem with this is obviously that either the ship needs to be moving backwards or, more likely, not at all, because otherwise the masts would be in the way.
That is, of course, only the case if the dragon is supposed to land ON the ship. Can dragons swim? Do they maybe even float, like ducks? If so, they could launch from the ship as described before, do their things, and then land in the water next to their carrier ships, swim to the sides, and climb/get lifted/magic onboard. That could work, I guess.

One thing that has not been looked at is that arranging the masts/sails in the way did, would probably give the ship very funky sailing charactaristics if the wind is coming from any direction other than straight astern (behind). With all the sideways pressure on the stern, it would probably want to turn into the wind pretty darn hard.

There is one category of ships that has been completely overlooked so far, which actually does not have any of those problems.
You know, there's probably a reason why modern CVs have little to no masts, and if they need any (antennae etc) they are tucked away to the side... as explained above, one of the reasons is that you want to be sailing into the wind whether you are launching or landing your air wing (be it planes or dragons). So maybe the most reasonably thing to do in our pre-modern setting would be to use a ship that does not need masts. I'm thinking galleys.

Though they typically had masts, it is entirely feasible to, well, not have them, and be completely reliant on oarsmen. This leaves you, literally, with a "flat top" (colloq., designation for CV) plenty of runway space for your dragon to do its take-off run, which can easily be cone into the wind, and at the same time, you can easily recover your dragons by having them coming in from the rear.

>Or just sail-less ships, but that would be shitty for a navy.
Oars are a thing, you know.
Alternatively, wide ship with two rows of sails and landing platform in the middle.

>build a SWATH vessel with wood?
having the submerged parts hollow --> very difficult to keep watertight, probably structural stability problems in the slim waterline parts.

just making the submerged bits solid, i.e. literal bundles of timber --> probably doable.

Thanks for the detailed info user

np.

Naturally I forgot to add that your typical galley would've been around 40 m in length (though there have been bigger ones up to 60m) to what I wrote here

I know oars exist, but I can't think of any large high sea ship relying solely on oars. But then I don't know shit.

>I can't think of any large high sea ship relying solely on oars
galleys, my dude. cf

Yeah, seems difficult. Maybe it you handwave something like magical caulk.

Galleys typically have sails, especially the biggest ones.
I'm doubtful you could perform well enough without them on high sea to be honest. They are going to be slow as fuck on large distance, and require a lot of supplies for both the rowers (as far as I know rowing require larger crew) and the damn dragon(s).
Then again aircraft carriers/dragon-nest ships being costly, slow and vulnerable would be appropriate and compensated by having fucking dragons to cover your ass.
Galleys also manoeuvre better to be fair.

>put dragon on deck
>turn dragon around, facing rearward
>feed dragon chilli
>???
>rocket powered galley

Mostly those masts could be put down tough. Not sure how quickly.

But yeah, you don't ocean-sail on a galley.

Is there a reason Dragons *have* to land on the deck? What if they landed in the water alongside and then climbed/were hoisted onto the ship. If it's light enough to fly it'll be light enough to float, some of the biggest birds you'll find on earth are sea-going after all. You might want to look more at seaplane tenders than carriers.

Alternatively, if the Dragons need a dry platform to land on, you could always tow a barge behind the tender. It'd give you a goodly bit of flat area to land on, but since all the actual dragon-supporting stuff would be on a conventional--if large--ship there wouldn't be the attendant weight and drag.

We need to know more about these dragons though. What's their wingspan and takeoff weight? How long a takeoff roll do they need, and how fast do they need to be going before they can fly?

You could make it a trimaran like design, with the sails on the main hull and the landing pads either on the secondary hulls or on the beams attaching the hulls.

I have zero idea how big you could make a wooden trimaran though.

There is already a book series about dragons in the Napoleonic wars, it includes ships designed to carry dragons.

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The sails and rigging are made from ghost wood, ghost hemp and ghost silk (from ghost silkworms).
Fake ghost pot is currently the biggest scam. Stop the ghost interaction enhancing roach clip from working to have a clear head almost instantly and no evidence but the roach clip left.

Look at the supertriremes Syracuse built in the time of the Diadochoi. Its definately possible

Neat

Why not use the dragon's fire breath to power a steam engine? Sure your dead in the water when he is gone, but you can just have other ships protect the carrier. Or just have multiple dragons on rotating shifts.

Something like this?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessarakonteres