23.12 Ship Equipment

Purchasing Ship Equipment
-------------------------
Shipfitters are responsible for creating, moving, and removing ship equipment and weapons on a ship.

The shipfitter will require SHIPFIT permissions for your ship and will, for a price, make the changes you want.

TRADEWHO SHIPFITTING will list shipfitters currently in the game!

Ship Commodities
----------------
Ship commodities are used by shipfitters to create and move ship equipment and weapons on your ship.

Ship commodities are created when they dismantle equipment or ships and can also be created from regular commodities.

Shipcloth - 50x cloth
Shipiron - 50x iron, 10x steel
Shipwood - 50x wood, 10x iron
Shiplines - 50x rope, 10x iron
Pitch - 50x wood, 10x animal fat


Weapons
-------
Weapons are in their own category and are covered in HELP SHIP WEAPONS. You
still purchase them from a shipfitter!

Available Equipment
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The tools and accessories are listed below, including
Bait Tank              Beacon of Iocolas             Captain's Trunk
Cartographers Desk     Diving Bell                   Leadline
Ship's Axe             Mariner's Sextant             Salvage crane
Token of Charybdis     Ship's Token Stores           Emergency Buoy
Wooden float           Multipurpose crane            Loudhailer


Bait Tank  - 40 shipiron and 5 pitch
---------
Keyword: "baittank"

You can have as many or as few of these as you like. Each holds 250 items of
any kind. Bait within will decay at a slower than usual rate. Fish are
unaffected. Everything else decays faster in the bait tank (sloshing
around in all that water isn't good for most things!). Place tanks in any or
all rooms on your ship, as many as you like.

Beacon of Iocolas - 20 shipiron, 50 goldbar, and 50 stone 
-----------------
Keyword "beacon"

The perfect accessory for fleets! This piece of equipment will provide much
more detail in SHIP LIST for the ship captain or owner who is not
sufficiently confident about the precise location of his ships. Can only
be used if not already on any ship. The Beacon goes on the bow only.

Captain's Trunk - 5 shipwood and 5 shipiron
---------------
Keyword: "trunk"

Mark your quarters by placing this trunk in your ship's cabin. Once placed,
your swashbucklers will recognise the sanctity of the Captain's quarters and
not patrol there. While it is a trunk, it is solely decorative, and is
unsuitable for the containment of items. The trunk can only go in the cabin.

Cartographer's Desk Standard - 5 shipwood and 5 shipiron
Cartographer's Desk Large    - 15 shipwood and 15 shipiron
----------------------------
Keyword: "standarddesk"
Keyword: "largedesk"

Where else would you put your maps? With a cartographer's desk, currently
priced at twenty five thousand gold, those of your crew able to take bearings
(helm or watch of sufficient specialisation) will be able to help you locate
places for which you have maps. Just put your maps into the desk and you're
ready to go. The desk can be in the cabin or on any deck (quarter, main,
side). If you don't specify, it goes on the quarterdeck and may not be
moved.

See HELP SHIP MAPS for somewhat more detail on maps. Blanks are for sale
from Maelstrom.

A shipfitter can upgrade from the Standard desk to the Large for the difference
in shipcomms.

Diving Bell - 20 shipwood, 10 shiplines, and 10 pitch
-----------
Keyword: "bell"

Deep sea divers need a way to get down to the sea bed - hence, the diving
bell. Have one or more divers SHIP ENTER BELL, then you can SHIP LOWER
BELL until it arrives at the local sea bed's surface. The bell will make
a ringing noise upon arrival, with the number of rings being an indication
of the likely danger of the area, in terms of local denizens, and the
possibility of treasure as well. If the bell is raised while divers
remain below, those divers must hurry to the bell or be sent to a watery
grave! 

Divers can SHIP LEAVE BELL at any time at all, no matter where
the bell may be, and be returned to the ship's deck. To explore the
sea bed, divers simply leave to the down whenever that appears. Fish or
other deep sea denizens found on the bottom of the sea may be befriended
or fought or treated in the same way as any other denizen. If fought,
their corpses cannot be sold at fish shops, though. Try offering them!
The bell can only be on the quarterdeck.

Leadline - 10 leather and 40 rope
--------
Keyword: "leadline"

How can you take a sounding without a leadline? And how can you know if there's
any chance of a good dive without having a sounding? There you go then. The
SHIP TAKE SOUNDING command requires a leadline. If you get a good sounding,
you'll know there's a chance for a good dive. If not, move along. The results
of your sounding have another salutary element - fish will not strike in
shallower waters. So don't try deepsea fishing if you're not in - guess it -
deep sea!

You could just go everywhere and dive, too. I recommend you take soundings.

Mariner's Sextant - 15 shipiron
-----------------
Keyword: "sextant"

How better to find your place in the cosmos than with a sextant, which gives a
fairly good idea as to your current position based on your knowledge of the sun
(and maybe someday, stars) and their movements through the skies. Try SHIP TAKE
SIGHTING at noon. These heavy, ship-mounted sextants can be placed in any
location on a ship that is not indoors. The sextant will give latitude only,
to a reasonable level of precision, but not exact. Perhaps some day Achaea's
star charts will be good enough to permit better results.

Salvage Crane - 15 shipwood, 15 shipiron, and 10 shiplines
-------------
Keyword: "salvagecrane"

The crane is needed for those seeking to perform salvage operations. To start
out SHIP SALVAGE SCAN will allow you to locate a sunken ship. Then the crane
will permit you to use SHIP SALVAGE <ship id> in order to pull the wreckage off
the ocean floor.

Multipurpose Crane - 20 shipwood, 25 shipiron and 15 shiplines
------------------
Keyword: "dredgecrane"

Multi-purpose crane is a crane that allows both salvaging of ships and dredging 
for cargo floats.

SHIP SALVAGE SCAN will allow you to locate a sunken ship. Then the crane will 
permit you to use SHIP SALVAGE <ship id> in order to pull the wreckage off the
ocean floor.

SHIP DREDGE BEGIN will allow you to begin dredging for sunken cargo where a 
ship sunk with a buoy on board. Each dredging attempt can retrieve a portion
of the cargo and add it to your hold. You cannot retrieve more than 30% total 
cargo from a wreck.

SHIP DREDGE STOP will abort a dredging operation.

Ship's Axe - 15 wood and 15 iron
----------
Keyword: "shipaxe"

Use this axe to free your ship from grapples sent aboard. CHOP TETHER.

Emergency Buoy  - 3 shipcloth and 3 shiplines
--------------
Keyword: "buoy"

A buoy is a one-use ship upgrade that does not decay. You can only have one aboard and it will disappear if it is ever used.

Upon sinking, you will be able to retrieve all of your cargo from your ship if you return to the location where your ship went down and SHIP BUOY ACTIVATE <buoy>. This can only be done by the owner of the sunken ship, or someone with Command rank 5. The entire cargo of the sunken ship will be transferred to the deck in a cargo box.

When the previously sunken ship and the ship with its cargo box on deck are in the same harbour, SHIP CARGOBOX TRANSFER to return the cargo to its owner.

SHIP BUOY LOCATE will give a buoy's ID, an approximate direction and distance, how many months remain on it, and which wreck it marks. 
This can be done by anyone who has captain permissions on the sunk ship at any time. When a buoy has less than 2 months remaining before it decays, anyone can locate it for dredging purposes.

If you wish, you can dump a cargobox, rendering all the cargo it holds naught but jetsam. Use SHIP CARGOBOX DUMP to do so.

SHIP INFO will list if a buoy is in place for a ship.

Wooden Float - 3 shipwood and 3 shiplines
------------
Keyword: "float"

A float is a thirty-month ship upgrade that increases your cargo capacity by 25!

A ship can only have one active at a time, and it cannot be preserved or repaired.

When the float decays any cargo over the base capacity of the ship will be lost.

SHIP INFO will inform if a float is active and how long remains until it decays.

Wooden Loudhailer - 10 wood and 5 cloth
-----------------
Keyword: "loudhailer"

The loudhailer allows you to HAIL <ship> <message>!
<ship> must be one word, it will work with ship target, ship IDs, partial ship names, and ship aliases. 

Everyone on your current ship and the target ship will hear your hails.

You cannot hail a cloaked ship or ships in a harbour and this does have a distance limitation.

Token of Charybdis (available from Maelstrom directly)
------------------
Not strictly a piece of equipment FOR a ship, it is nonetheless indispensable
for those ON ships, providing you a way to be rescued from a captainless ship.

Simply SHIP RESCUE ME to invoke the spirit of Charybdis, then wait a while, and
voila! At huge personal cost, you will arrive safely and mostly unharmed at a
mainland harbour.

Ship's Token Stores (available at Tasur'ke and Shala-Khulia harbours)
-------------------
These are sort of bulk equivalents of Tokens of Charybdis which are usable
only by any crew/shipmates/etc (denizen crew), and only when a ship sinks.
They are not quite perfect, but on the whole, very effective. All crew who
use one of the Tokens from the ship's store will be preserved to continue to
serve when the ship is salvaged.

One of the huge advantages to the token stores is that if you do save some
of your crew, you will have a highly-experienced and motivated cadre who
will train up any new crew you hire very quickly. Whatever amount of
experience might be lost by bringing in new crew will be regained in a
very short time.

On the other hand, if you lose your entire crew, then there is no cadre
and thus, your new crewmembers begin as raw recruits, so to speak.

(See also: HELP SHIPS, HELP SHIPFITTER, and HELP SHIP WEAPONS)