Boat Design Software / Spreadsheets

[Capn Mud]

Hi Oh Knowledgable Ones,

I am planning to try and design my own boat. Never even dabbled in this before so I only have pictures of what I think it should be like in my head at present. I am a civil engineer so in theory I can possibly sort out forces and buoyancy etc from first principles but I am sure it can get rather complex and that would be reinventing the wheel.

What software etc would people recommend I buy?

Thanks in advance,
Andrew

[Trevlyns]

The most frequently mentioned in these forums is Freeship - and as it's name implies, it's totally free!

[Capn Mud]

Thanks alot Trevlyns - I have found the Software and Spreadsheets section.

Apologies to any I waste the time of reading this thread.

Cheers,
Andrew

[Chris Ostlind]

Cap'n,

Freeship is very good, (Freeship V2.6 is better than the current, Delftship freeware) but like any software that can do many things, it has a learning curve.

There is a simpler freeware/shareware program that can also give a lot of very good results if you are planning on building your boat in plywood...
Carlson's Hulls www.carlsondesign.com

Hulls will allow you to design a boat with up to 10 surfaces for the hull which you can manipulate through movable points in 3 dimensions. Hulls has a rudimentary hydrostatics function which will get you very nicely into the correct ballpark and best of all... the .hull output files from Hulls are directly importable into Freeship, where you can do more accurate fairing and have a deeper hydrostatic package.

I like to use Hulls as a "sketch pad" for new ideas where I can quickly rough out the concept, take a look a its hydrostatics and then port it over to Freeship for additional examination. I can go through dozens of iterations on a basic design that way before I get into the business of doing really accurate lines fairing and resolving the issues surrounding the cabin and interior layout.

All of my final work is done in Rhino3D.

[Capn Mud]

Thanks for your information - helpful as ever Chris.