I'm reading a series of historical novels set in the Napoleonic wars and have long been interested in the naval battles of the early American Navy during the revolutionary war and war of 1812.
What I'm wondering is what differences were there in the ship designs and roles between the French, British and American ships. I'd also be curious about Spanish and Dutch naval architecture.
To boil down my question... what role did the design of naval vessels play in the dominance of the Royal Navy, the relative success of the American "Super-frigates" and the comparative limitations of the French and other colonial powers in contrast to the "fitness" or "capability" of the sailors themselves or the strategic ability of their commanders.
I've written a few times about ship design during this period, and these previous answers may be of interest to you:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2709jm/how_would_a_britishhms_frigate_built_in_1715/
To quote from a chunk of that top one, which I think might help to answer your question (I don't want to quote the whole thread, it took a bit to get here though).
At this point, then, it's worth pausing and considering what was happening in the world of ship design in Europe. The large French ships, at least nominally, were being built to a plan dictated from Versailles, although individual yards could and did make modifications particularly to hull shapes that could change a ship's seaworthiness. But the French designs were being dictated from academic studies (the French were the first to conceptualize of a metacenter of a ship, and to theorize about metacentric height) and they were not built well. French ships were lightly built, fastened with nails instead of treenails, and their designers favored very long hulls and taunt (very high) masts, meaning their ships would be very fast off the wind. But their performance suffered greatly close-hauled (that is, beating into the wind) and in any kind of a sea state. They were designed with light timbers to be buoyant, and carry guns high, but light timbers suffered greatly under normal hogging and sagging strains. Their theories also led them to believe that the working of a ship helped it to move faster, rather than simply causing great strain on a ship's inward parts; all these things meant that French ships had high building costs and maintenance costs and short lives, and dockyard constructors knew they were building poor ships. (I should mention, in fairness to the French, that they had natural interests in the Mediterranean that the British did not until after the capture of Gibraltar; their ships performed excellently in that odd tideless sea.)
In contrast to this, British designs were by midcentury and later being voted on in the broad sense, but it was up to individual yards and shipwrights to build to specifications. British ships tended to be shorter than comparable French designs, but they were more heavily timbered; their weight helped them perform well going to windward and in heavy weather; and they had full hull forms that could be stored for long voyages, either spending time on blockade or long periods of time overseas. They were meant to be inexpensive to build and maintain, in a navy that knew that they would have a difficult time keeping pace simply out of their own building in matching their needs.
In any case, in practical terms, the French designs didn't actually tend to be faster than the British; given the technical constraints at the time, speed can't be accounted before merely by construction. The main limiting factors seem to be the cleanliness of ships' bottoms (which docking and coppering, both British advantages, contribute to) and the ship's trim, rig and the skillfulness of the crew. British ships often outsailed French ships in conditions that should have favored the French. (To briefly break the 20-year-rule, skill at sailing even today makes the difference in races between boats built to be identical.) Moreover, ships captured by the British tended to be faster after re-rigging, re-stowing of holds and re-hanging of decks, suggesting that there was technical knowledge in the shipyards' hands that was not there for the French.
I would be remiss here also not to mention the American navy, which largely adopted British shipbuilding practices (because in practice their yards and their methods had been British for a century or so before the Brits lost the colonies). The nascent American navy, famously, built six frigates to be (oversimplifying here) the equivalent of battlecruisers, heavier than any British frigate but able to run away from any British ship of the line. There were supposed to be two classes of frigate, three in each class, but idiosyncrasies among the shipyards meant that they had wildly different performance.