As fate would have it in 1758, the same year of Lord Nelson's birth the Board of Admiralty ordered twelve new ships of the line, among them a 'first-rate' ship with 100 guns, to be named Victory. HMS Victory is a first-rate warship with four masts built to be a floating gun platform with 100 cannon of different calibers arranged on three decks. She took seven years to build at a cost is today's money of 50 million English pounds, designed by Thomas Slade of the Royal Navy and laid down in Chatham Dockyard, England. Sir John Lindsay, Victory's first Captain, took command In March 1778. On May 8, 1778, she set sail for sea duty for the first time exactly 13 years and a day, 4,746 days from the time of her launching. Her active service life began on Friday June 13 when she sailed from Spithead as the Flagship of the Channel Fleet and first cleared her decks for action on the July 23, 1778.So you can't just build ships with fresh-cut wood. It needs to dry and season first. Unless they had massive stockpiles of seasoned wood, they would have had a problem.A story in itself is the construction of the Victory. The 18th century shipwrights had only simple gear and tools and the difficulty of moving enormous timbers from where they were felled to the dockyard in Chatham. This extensive skilled workforce of about 250 men were required to accomplish the work. The shipwrights needed a hundred acres of oak forest, about 6,000 selected mature oak trees found in the weald forest of Kent and Sussex in England. The balance of the timber needed was fir, elm, and pine and was cut and stored knowing the wood required seasoning or drying for many years.
Ok, so the show has dragons, walking dead people, a kid who can time travel and remote view anything anywhere, but building ships with unseasoned wood, that’s where you draw the line? Just kidding, I think everybody had a problem with how fast those ships just appeared. And you would need a few thousand crew to go with it, and they just sailed away.