Completely amateur >70cm RC boat

Hi! We are a completely amateur team of 16-17 years olds, planning to compete in a university boat designing and building competition. Two of our number are sailors, and are all competent in physics. We understand the race we are to compete in is an olympic course, so we require both jib and main, and are looking for suggestions for a rigging and control system, and a means of constructing the hull. The boat must be at least 2kg in mass, and be controlled by radio control to a set of servos (90 degree). We do not have any complex machine tools, but do have a flair for innovative design and a challenge! If you have suggestions or tips, please answer here or contact us at bob_g_05@hotmail.com . Thank you!

Team Nunatak, Scotland.

[Stephen Ditmore]

There's a radio controlled class of sailboats raced in the United States, particularly in the northeast, known as the 50/800 class or the Marblehead Class. It must be a monohull, 50 inches long, 800 sq inches of sail area max. That would be one possible starting place. There's a guy named Lord in the Orlando, FL area who makes a radio controlled model of a Whitbred/Volvo 60 complete with spinnaker that can be launched, recovered, and relaunched by remote control. Finally, Greg Ketterman of Hobie Cat in California did the development work on his hydrofoil using remote control models.

If there's no length or sail area limit, my thought would be to do a trimaran. Check out:

http://www.mvpvlp.com/index_flash.html
http://boatdesign.net/archive/2001.htm
http://www.trihulls.com/