New to cat design - so many questions...

Maybe things have changed a lot but what I've seen, if you look at a file with the commands to a cutting machine CNC, instructions are only for circular arcs and straight lines. There are no commands to cut a polynomial of second or third degree.

 

I have a desktop CNC machine from Inventables that seems to be using Bezier curves to generate the paths.

 

Maybe I have explained wrong. The curve may look like a B-spline but actually is a polyline.

 

You may be right. There's a g code command for NURBS, but under the hood it's probably just a combination of line segments and circular arcs. In the longer term, I hope to be able to carve out a model of the boat, but it would be from thin flat sheets simulating plywood, so the shapes wouldn't need to be that complex anyway.

 

The perimeter of the shell plating, developed, are often curves the type we're talking about.