Kettleship

A Kettleship (Fhs: Soitheaciteal) was a type of warship built in the mid-16th to late 18th Centuries around the Vandarch Sea. Kettleships were the largest ships in the inland sea during most of the 16th and 17th Centuries, and were constructed around a wide, oval-shaped hull and posessed a forecastle angled bowwards, giving the design its name. The ship would consist of two or three decks, either propelled entirely by oars and towing or later by a mixture of oars and gaff sails. The top deck would be roofed with openings for sailors to access sails and rigging, which was fastened to the roof; the deck would typically be partially walled to obscure personnel and equipment onboard, with gunports and doors built into it. The construction of the ships was in most cases fairly simple, managing to leveraging the immature warship industry around the Vandarch coasts as well as the usually calm weather.

Kettleships were designed as a slow, variable form of littoral storeship, troopship, or battery ship, supplementing their wide hulls with a number of anchors. Such vessels were used in support of land forces moving along the coast or as a static blockade element, sitting in a single location and acting either as a source of additional supply and housing or hosting a battery of heavy artillery to bombard coastal regions and sever access to bays and inlets. Kettleships were phased out of most Vandarch-bound naval forces by the mid-18th Century, as the design was easily predated upon by faster ships without the support of conventional warships, which increasingly grew in size until it was simpler to build more conventional vessels to fill the same roles Kettleships had performed at not only a similar scale, but also with deep water stability and far greater speed.