Interesting design

[rapscallion]

I'm not sure if this has already been posted; I thought it was interesting enough to post.

It's called the Kolibri 23.

I have been wondering what a wave piercing trimaran of this size might look like.

[Doug Lord]

Raps, thanks for pointing this out. I looked it up and all I could find(so far) was the pdf below. But what a find: scroll down and there is a simple incredible picture of an 18' trapeze equipped high performance trimaran(MF-18)-simply fantastic-thanks!

[rattus]

I think the bifurcated "snout" a bit strange - structurally, wouldn't it be a lot more efficient to share the forestay loads with the bow, rather than on a dedicated prodder of the same length? I think I understand the desire to keep the prodder aove the waves, but I think a narrow bow would have the same effect with less overall structure (and weight). Maybe a bit more windage.

Mike

[COOL]

Originally Posted by rattus

bifurcated "snout"

Thanks, I was looking for a term to describe that form.
I agree with your assessment. It looks like it adds a lot
of complexity to the build.

[ThomD]

Yeah, that looks pretty but makes no sense. My view of wave piercing is that it is either for incidence control or to lengthen the waterline.

So the former is the original Gold Coast design that was designed to control pitching. Made sense for the water taxi business in that it operated in level and smoothed out waves. You get a longer waterline, and pitch control out front. If it were full height the bow would rise in waves, and not stabillize. This makes less sense on the kind of boat that could dive down a wave, surfing and get caught and flip. It also doesn't make a lot of sense on a boat with full length amas that are basically doing all that when you are pressed anyway.

The other thing might be a 23 foot boat with an attachable nose of say 5 feet. So you get a 23 foot tri, but when you launch you can strap on this dildo. It isn't necessarily wonderful, but will make a boat with a longer footprint, and nose bury may not be a problem if one doesn't seize the opportunity to rig the boat as though it were actually the full 28 feet. The dildo is sorta an afternoon's work, for a significant increase in hydro.

[Doug Lord]

Has anyone taken two minutes to look at the 18' trimaran I linked to? You have to scroll down....

[Corley]

The 18' tri looks interesting they look like low buoyancy amas an excellent idea on a small lightweight craft it's an area where a lot of small tris seem to lose the initiative they make the amas high wooded and add alot of weight.

Crew weight is very important in a boat that size why put massive amas on it when you have a mobile counterweight of crew weight thats not negotiable anyway.

The 23' tri looks like an unnecessarily complex way to address the problem just make the main hull bow longer, leaner and keep the same rig the only way I could see the design making sense is if it was built to exploit some particular box rule, that bowsprit will require more complex (and expensive) engineering to be sufficiently rigid when a simple bow structure could do the same job.