Newbie to (more) serious boat designing

[gunship]

Hello, I'm new here, so i first thought i'd introduce myself.

i'm 17 years old, I live in sweden and i like boats. my grandpha was a boat designer/marine engineer, and ever since i was a little kid i drew boats in crossections - allthough whith lots of missing details, and only in profile.

however, now i have decided to drawing some boats again, and this time im fairly serious - weight, stability and such matters now. i started drawing one of my boats in autocad, whitch is the only CAD program that i was familiar whith, but only in 2D. then i made it 3d, by essentially putting the top, side and front wiev on each other, and now i have a boat outer shell.

now comes the reason for my thread;)

i wonder if anyone could reccomend me a way to start getting such useful but hard-to-calculate-manually data as weight, froude number and stability from my drawing.

thanks!

[TeddyDiver]

Best if you take and read a couple of books from Skene or Brewer for instance. Take a search here on the forums of the recommended books and/or take a look at Book Store of this site.

br Teddy

[gunship]

ok, ill give it a try

EDIT- i had no luck, but wouldn't there be a way to calculate it in the computer via software?

[gunship]

So, now i have uploaded a screen of my boat. as you can see, i have put down quite a work in it, so it would be convenient if i could either start calculating in autocad, or export it to a more boat-frienldy CAD program...

http://i114.photobucket.com/albums/n257/biggles_92/Gunshipsyacht.png

[yipster]

a free option is to export schooner.dxf to polycad than into delftship for example
there are file convertion programs on the net and autocad also has igis

[gunship]

ok, thanks.

And by the way, i think its a Ketch ;) (forward mast has larger sail than aft mast, but its not clearly visible...)

[gunship]

so, i managed to export it into polycad via autocad .dxf -files, but then the solids dissapear. its not that bad i thought, but then after saving it in .geo from polycad, i cannot re-open it in polycad, neither import it in delftship.

it says "unable to convert string number ()"
while Delftship says "the file contains no B spline surfaces"

[yipster]

hi gunship, i try'd most in and out's and was planning on this one but havent try'd yet
i usually start in delftship and than to acad, 3d studio and other programs
vrml didnt work well eighter, delftship dxf in problems were discussed here before, hmm..
you could try delftship's forum, persistance usually wins and plz let me know how you work out

nice drawing, good luck