Gack! You guys type faster than I do! However, I HAVE been on such a ship. (Santa Maria replica) 888888888888888888888888 <---pieces of eight My understanding is that there have been threads in the past in the Merchants Forum, complaining about "competition" from freestuff providers. (This is hearsay.) However, freestuff was here first. Sometimes it is better. The price of something is totally unrelated to quality or scarcity in a virtual market. If you make something better and give it away, the merchants will have to improve their products, provide services, whatever. Sometimes the services include stability (knowing that you will be able to get help with something next year), sometimes flexibility (works in P5?), sometimes interlocking support from others (morphs-textures-clothes). Koz and Maya give away great hair, but Quarker, Hmann, Neftis, Anton and others have all managed to sell hair. Lots of hair. What I would suggest is that this ship be a little different from the Craweel. In the age of wooden ships each one was hand-built. Sailors exactly identified that fleck on the horizon by the line of a prow or height of a mast or cut of a jib (useful when piracy was rampant and you might need to run for it!). Ships were not only hand-built, but patched at sea. In a convoy of Indiamen, one would expect to pick out peculiarities of each boat, even more so than ducklings in a line! In a sea battle, or even sitting in a foreign port, one would be dealing with different nationalities... so what would the Danish and English and Spanish ships of this time have featured? Even a slightly different cut to the sail would add variety. If Pauli's ship is German and yours is French, for example, there is a solid underpinning for any images showing battle, confrontation, or a race to claim a trade route. Another thing I'd suggest might be harder, but you are planning this for close-ups. The decks were sanded daily (probably to keep them from getting slimy and slippery), so would look softer, whiter, with a less obvious grain pattern than the hull or any of your upright trim pieces. I'm not sure when they started putting copper on ship bottoms, but they'd be pitched to the waterline (noticeable when a ship is leaning with her sails full of wind). If you go with smaller maps, you can have more of them, and actually improve the realism. As long as your ship is not derived from the other (no mesh or textures used as a stepping stone to your own), there shouldn't be a copyright problem. However, he has done a certain amount of research in order to build a likely reconstruction for his ship. Merchant ships such as this have appeared on the heraldic devices for families and cities as well as guilds: The North Borneo Company; Bristol, the Borough of Bermondsey, the Burgh of Alloa, the Town of Eccles, the Town of Oban; Conder, Albemarle O Dewar, Sir Arthur MacPherson, Charles T Brisbane, Campbell, William K MacDonald, John A Galbraith, Arthur A Reid, Alexander MacMorran (all from a quick eyeballing through one of my heraldry books)... yes, I still would rather reach for a book. Columbus's ships were trading ships: small and tubby. 2 were caravel/carvel/craweel. A replica of the Santa Maria is at Columbus Ohio, and it is open to the elements - not decked over - so that must have increased the misery. The Mary Rose has been raised. The Vasa is slightly later. A bit of Google/Image dug up these, so you should be able to find a nice specimen. http://www.citycliks.com/nina.htm http://www.abc.se/~m10354/publ/vasa.htm http://cma.soton.ac.uk/Research/Kravel/ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/2413337.stm http://www.geocities.com/glupscherle/shipsection (Drawing of a carrack of 1502, David Meagher 2001) http://www.maryrose.org/visiting/tour1.htm http://www.webrighter.co.uk/modelkit/jotika/maryrose.htm (model with crisp details) HTH, Carolly