Ephemeral

• Typical features Length 245ft, Beam 35ft, Depth 20ft. Tonnage: 1000 tons Crew: 100-200
• Average Base Cost to Build 685,000 true
• Average Time to Build 20-28 months

At the end of the war with Blood, many nations had lost their ships in the sea battles, and those fleets proved hard to replace. Wood was harder to acquire during the Dark Ages, especially because it was also needed for firewood to keep warm. It took the ingenuity of a number of mercantile interests on Mistone who still had the means to invest in some local shipyards, and the vision to eventually replace the lost fleets, once the war and the following Dark Ages were over. The consortium expanded several small shipping yards until they were able to support the production of larger ships. While this meant they could now construct bigger vessels, with a lack of appropriate skills and resources at their disposal the production was slow. A few years after the shipyards were converted, a number of large and very fast sailing ships emerged from the yards and stimulated the interest of other seafarers and shipbuilders across the world. Although the enterprising mercantile consortium eventually broke up during the Dark Ages, the local shipyards kept the blueprints and have begun taking on more orders for these large and fast ships.

The Ephemeral class vessels are at their best on long runs with cargo that can spoil relatively fast, or with passengers who need to travel quickly. There are a few variations often seen in the design of these vessels. The most common difference between ships is the number of masts, which is either three or four. Through trial and error, the shipbuilders also realized that with this particular design, the longer they made vessel, the faster it would go. By maximizing the length of their ships and by giving them as much sail as possible, these shipbuilders have made the Ephemeral ships one of the fastest classes of large vessels currently at sea.