America's Cup declining?

Great comments Norcal and David! Here is the America's Cup thread- in the "Multihulls" forum(yeah!) : http://www.boatdesign.net/forums/multihulls/34th-americas-cup-multihulls-34612.html

And for those that have watched some of the AC 45 racing and haven't seen this comparison with an AC 72 it will blow your mind:

45 vs 72--click on image

 

The AC45s and AC72s looking strikingly like the newer Formula 16/18/20 cats. Crew of 5? on the AC 45 and 11? on the AC72? That's a lot of sail to handle. Can't wait for the first one to come out of the molds.

 

"Back to 12 meter monohulls.". ---- Ho Hum ---- boring---- Yawn.
Not to put too much emphasis on it because of the tragic loss of life, but a 65 ft monohull schooner, a former race boat, with seven people on board, has just disappeared without trace, on the way from NZ.

 

Talking about Nina, perhaps?

There are already 2 threads about that accident, why spreading it all over the forum?
http://www.boatdesign.net/forums/al...assic-21m-us-schooner-nina-missing-47470.html
http://www.boatdesign.net/forums/sailboats/schooner-nina-47485.html

 

Oldsailor seems to be making a firm precedent that any time a type of craft suffers a mishap, the news should be spread over threads that are on different topics.

So the news about the tragic death of Bart Simpson about a cat should be posted in the Little America's Cup thread and the chainplate replacement thread, to make sure everyone knows those boats kill.

The capsize of the ORMA 70 Spindrift in the Route de Princes (two taken to hospital, one with a fractured pelvis) a few days ago should be posted in the "auxiliary power" thread, according to Oldsailor's behaviour.

Or it could just be that we could accept that some people like certain types of craft for certain reasons and others prefer other types. Unfortunately, some people seem to believe that everyone has to like just what they like and they can't stop attacking other types.

 

How about a Perimeter Rule of, perhaps, 57 meters.

What would be measured within this rule are:

1.) Beam,
2.) Length, and
3.) Air Draft (distance from lowest point of the deepest appendage to the highest point of the sail).

That would be it.

Quite simple, but with a lot of room for creativity.

Most likely you would end up with foiling catamarans that are around 20 meters long.

 

How about a Sharpii Cup?
Make up your own rules and see how it goes.

Otherwise this has been a bunch of old guys whinning about the "good ole days".

Talk to Petros about creating a new class race.

 

The existing Deed of Gift has something similar, with a minimum waterline length of 44 ft, maximum waterline length of 90 ft (for vessels with a single mast), maximum depth of 20 ft, and no restrictions on the design of centerboards or sliding keels.

The most recent time boats were raced to this box rule was in 2010, and the time before that was 1988, so the wide-open box rule approach hasn't proven to be very popular.

Most clubs don't want to encourage a great deal of creativity, because that is believed to be expensive and it increases the risk of getting it so wrong that no amount of skill on the part of the crew can make the boat competitive. They prefer a design rule that constrains the potential differences in speeds between the boats, making for closer racing and more spectator interest.

It's often believed this also minimizes the cost of developing the boats, because an expensive development program will yield only modest returns. However, the experience has been that if the resources are available, they will be expended in the attempt to obtain even a small competitive edge. Since, "there is no second place," close racing simply magnifies the importance of small differences in obtaining a binary result.

It's fascinating to read the Lawson History of the America's Cup, written in 1902, to see how the same issues that are being discussed now are the same ones that roiled the waters in the first 50 years of Cup matches. One only has to read the challenger's accusations in the Dunraven Affair to get an appreciation of the accusations of conspiracy in today's rudder-gate controversy. And today's Coast Guard permits had their origin in the special act of Congress passed in 1896, giving the Secretary of the Treasury authority to use revenue cutters to control spectator boats at regattas.

Indeed, Valkerie II sank, and suffered the death of a crewman, on July 5, 1894 after the cutter Satanita luffed to avoid a foundered spectating rowboat and collided with Valkerie II in a regatta in Scotland. This led Lord Dunraven to threaten to refuse to race Valkerie III in an America's Cup race on the grounds of safety, unless the NYYC took steps to restrain the spectator fleet. So even today's situation, with a fatal accident aboard a potential challenger leading to controversies about safety and threats of racing boycotts, are echos of historical events.

The America's Cup will survive the current troubles, and interest in the future will be all the stronger for it. It may take a couple of regattas to sort out the radical changes needed to adapt the Cup to 21st century technology, but I've no doubt that sort it they will.

 

From some angles it could also be relevant to point out that the Valkyrie II/Satanita fatality was very, very different from the Artemis tragedy.

One was a collision when amateurs (not the normal pros) were doing a fleet race start and a non-racing boat got in their way. The other was a sole professionally-crewed boat out training.

The Big Class type boats raced for about 40 years, with just a single "one boat" fatality (afaik) and one boat lost (the 23m Brynhilde when her mast went through her garboard in 1909). Given that the class sometimes had over 220 individual starts in a year and the boats did deliveries or races to France, the Med, Germany, Scotland, Ireland and across the Atlantic, that's a pretty good safety record.

Excellent point about the fact that the wide-open DoG box is unpopular, BTW.

 

Given that the new AC boats (multihulls) have had precisely 3 Cups, there really is no evidence yet to suggest that 1 fatality is a trend.

Cup rules have been adjusted continuously, and we are seeing the normal reaction to any accident / new revelation of the consequences of a specific design or design features.

 

I think one of the lessons of this evolution is that if you're going to write a highly constraining box rule, constraining elements that contribute to control is probably a bad idea.

Cheers,

Earl

 

Getting it wrong with a Sum (Perimeter) rule?

As a life long student of boat design, I see little likelihood of any competent designer getting it wrong with a Sum Rule (Perimeter Rule).

The first choice he/she will make is what kind of boat, mono hull or multi hull. The answer, since there is no minimum weight stipulated is clearly a multi hull. A good multihull is capable of sailing speeds that are well beyond traditional ’hull speed’. A mono with canting ballast would be the next likely choice, as it too can greatly exceed traditional hull speed. The extra draft it requires could be traded off for a narrower Beam.

The next choice would be how long to make it. If you make it too long, Beam and Air Draft will suffer, giving you a boat that may still have plenty of sail, but has a very low AR rig, which will compromise windward ability. This would be deadly in a tacking duel. Most likely the designer will choose a length of roughly one third of the total Sum.

The balance would be spent on Beam and Air Draft.

Most likely, if the designer picked a multihull, she/he will choose a Beam equal to roughly half the Length. If a canting ballast monohull was chosen, he/she might choose a Beam of one quarter to one third the Length, leaving the balance to Air Draft.

So now the Sum situation stands as follows:

Mono = 57 - 19 - 5.7 (0.30 * Length) = 32.3 M left
Multi = 57 -19 - 9.5 (0.50* Length) =28.5 M left

Most likely the canting ballast mono designer will chose a slightly shorter rig to get a deeper ballast strut. This will lower the Center of Area (CA) and give the ballast strut more moment.
I think it’s a fairly good guess that he/she will choose a total rig height of around 26 M , leaving 6.3 M for the Draft. The profile depth of the hull, of course, will have to be subtracted from this.
I think it is safe to guess the designer would choose something in the order of 2.0 M, so the rig will tower 24 M above the hull.

The multi designer will probably pick a draft just deep enough to get a board of adequate area and AR. The balance (minus maybe 2.0 M in Hull depth) will go towards the rig height. I’ll take a guess at a board draft of 3.0 M, leaving a rig height of say 23.5 M (28.5 - 3.0 - 2.0).

Both boats would probably have around 200 SM of sail. With a displacement of around 10 mt each, the S/Ds would be around 40.

And this is just the first trip around the preliminary design spiral.

Most likely, fine tuning of proportions would follow.

Both designers may choose slightly shorter boats, for example.

 

It's very worthwhile for people interested in rating rules to read "Men Against The Rule" by Charles Poor, written in the 1930s, which traces the evolution of rules (and rule-beaters) down to the Universal Rule. A print-on-demand place is now reprinting it, which has driven down the prices on original copies.

Cheers,

Earl

 

Depending on your definition, almost every designer has "got it wrong" when selecting the basic dimensions in plenty of rules. Almost all of them got the basic dimensions "wrong" in classes as wide open as 18 Foot Skiffs and early World Cup windsurfers, in classes as tight as the IACC yachts, and in classes as loose as IOR boats and early Frei Renjollen and Square Metre yachts.

The rulemakers also got it "wrong" (in that the designs ended up different to the ones the rule was aiming to create, or unhealthy in some ways) in ORMA 60 tris, IACC boats, Metre boats, Square Metre boats, IOR boats, 18 Foot Skiffs, and many others. For example, in Square Metre designs the freedom in the early rules created enormously long and expensive boats with tiny rigs. They were fast only as the rule rated them, not for their cost or length. the 18s ended up with such vast rigs and wings that they were uneconomic.

Given a wider box there's probably more room for "undesirable" designs. You could end up with a (pulling numbers from the air) a 150 foot long cat with an extremely narrow beam and shallow draft. It could be a sod to handle, may capsize every fourth race and could be vastly more expensive than a 72 foot cat but if that corner of the box ends up fractionally faster then everyone will have to sail them.

Given these facts, it's hard to see that designers could come up with options that would provide good boats and decent racing in an even wider box. Depending on your definition of "decent", I don't think it's ever happened in history.

The only person who has ever tried to analyse how the amount of design variation in performance affects the health of a racing class was Frank Bethwaite, as far as I know. His article said that too much variance in design creates smaller fleets, but it was a brief piece. However, real life experience shows us that classes in which designs vary too much do give poor racing.

I used to race what was possibly the most open class in the history of sailing. It was fun in many ways, completely impractical, and died. The same has happened in just about every sport.

BTW, for some time the AC was sailed in one of the most open rules around. Herreshoff himself wrote a tighter, more restrictive rule to replace it, because he felt that the tighter rule made for better boats and a better sport.

 

I'll look for that. Thanks.