Great research, capt' scurvy.
It should be pointed out, though, that no perfectly precise measurement could be possible anyway. Ships are constantly going up and down in the water, and weight variations makes the ship float with more or less immersion. The mast height is never a 'definitive' measurement. Measuring how much weight a ship is carrying is done by a method called 'draft survey', which measures how immersed is the ship, before and after being unloaded. And I can tell you, its a matter of several meters, or say, 10 feet!
We're dealing with cargo ships, are we not? How do we know if the target is loaded or unloaded? Because the distance of the top of the mast (or any other part of the ship for that matter) will be closer to the waterline when loaded, and farther when unloaded.
So having such thing as a perfect stadimeter reading was impossible (as it still is), even today. Unless you try to guess if the ship is coming or going from the embarkment port. If you knew it was ferrying supplies, or bringing in raw materials, i thing it would be wise to take the stadimeter and input a mast heigh which is several meters lower.
The stadimeter works with the idea of parallax, which, for those who don't know already, is this: your eyes move inwards to see close objects, and outwards to see farther objects. If you know the distance between your pupils, and the angle that is made by the two lines of sight (one for each eye), then it is a simple matter of trigonometry to find the range to the viewed object. The stadimeter does exactelly that. If you imput the mast height from the waterline, and split the image in two, you get the parallax angle and, thus, distance.
But being the mast height a variable info, how can you get PERFECT distance readings? how do you know if the ship is heavy or light? If it has burned up all it's fuel already?
In fact, how do we even know if the game takes this into consideration?
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