So, some day there may be a “Disney type” of Tall Ship ride that replicates the tall ship experince, but I don’t ever see a marketable need for a serious tall ship simulator that would train mariners and/or qualify them for sailing on board a tall ship in sail handling etc. However not for simulation training where they would pull “imaginary lines” etc to make a tall ship simulator react to a mariners input at the controls, this in my opinion is best left for the real world training on board an actual vessel. We have tall ship sailors that come to our school all the time for BRM, ARPA training etc. The cost of modeling a sailing vessel for running in a simulator would cost in the 10’s of thousands of dollars, and few companies have that kind of money in invest in such development with the lack of a low financial return. In the Ship Simulator - Sailing Boat game, experience real Kayak Boat simulation on your mobile Dodge the crocodiles and other obstacles in the flowing. TRANSAS does have a “target ship” that looks like a tall ship, but it is just “eye candy” in simulations. I say this from the perspective of actually sailing the vessels and the related functions VS the navigation of a tall ship. There simply would not be a market for their use that would justify a company like TRANSAS or others to make the capital investment in the software and related hardware development necessary to produce a tall ship simulator for the market place. Having been involved in the tall ship industry for sometime (over 20 years), and in the past 3 years running and building simulation exercises for training marines, I don’t ever expect to see a tall ship simulator.
I know of the online game you speak of and it is very good, however it is nothing like current full mission bridge ship simulation you experince at an academy, union school or private maritime training school when it comes to the realism of shipboard operations, ship interaction, hydrodynamics, roll play etc etc. Some folks had come to us at POBII and we got into discussions about making a tall ship Simulation that folks could experince much like a ride. There was talk about 12 years ago or so, to build a “3D tall ship ride” in Baltimore’s inner Harbor when the ESPNZone was built. Here is what I know of TS simulators or lets say the lack of them.