Incredible "Secrets of Yacht Design" website located...

I will not add to the perception that I am participating in a flame war.
A few questions
Any insight as to why the PHRF is 216?
Any insight as to why Maghetto defends it so strongly?

 

Comparing tempature scales to nautical ans statute miles is a bit ridiculous don't you think? To make it a fair comparison we should be talking about KPH and MPH. This I can understand the need to be able to switch back and forth to. Having been on all major continents and working in every major seaport in the world I have never once entered a port and been told to report my speed on approach in MPH or KPH. It is not like MPH is used anywhere in the sea going world. As for your buds around the cooler, maybe you take the time to explain to them what a knot is, much the same way my friends explain to me what 17C is when I am in Europe and Asia.

As for the rest of your inflammatory post, I am sorry that you don't find any value in someone trying to give you information which you ask for. Maybe it is not the messenger or the message maybe it is you. Others seem to think that might be the case. I hope you chose to read other threads but if not I will not lose any sleep over it, as for posting to other sailboat threads I think I could encourage you to not post as it seems from this thread, it is you which have nothing to offer of value.

 

I have been called both a Spic and a Whop but have never considered spaghetto to be derogatory. Of course I do not consider the term "I will pray for you" to be derogatory either. And yet Andrew Masion, Technical Director for Formation Design Systems may..

Let us open the church of FOYD by praying for Andrew Mason. We pull from the dead thread (a well of lost souls) where Mason replied to my post that The Mac26x is a better offshore boat than TP52s. There is no doubt about that by the math.

We hope to call Andew to this thead for a defense of his statement today. If that is not possible, let us be kind. It takes a lot of effort to unlearn. In boat design today, no one has more than 5 years of relevant experiance. The uninitiated, the virgins in the field, are more likely to come up with a modern design than a person like possibly Andrew. The Church of FOYD is now open. Let us pray for Anderw Mason. May he see the light of redemption.

Mistral, your posts on the TP52 thread look to be intact. You have the closing comment. The thread continues to be well viewed. Why not run with it? In the mean time lets do come up with derogatory terms for the TP52s. I liked paper boats -- as in Toilet Paper. How about boats of cards as in 52 card pick up? Or 52 sheets to the wind For newbees to the forum see

http://boatdesign.net/forums/showthread.php?t=5471&page=1&pp=15

Teeter Principle boats is the mighettoism. Lets just realize that 5 or 7 years of work on the TP52 has recently got the new ones to the point that they finally pass the SNAME capsize ratio and US Sailing capsize screening ratio. 11 of these boats is enough. Can the world really support 20 of them by the end of 2005. I think not. What is needed is more Mac26x cruisers.

 

Woodboat:
These are the kind of ramblings I and others have referred to.

 

Lets give you the real skinny on knots. First a nautical mile is not the same distance every place in the world. This is because it is more a measure of time than of distance. The time it takes the sun to travel degrees on the sphere of the earth. Because the earth is not perfectly spherical, a nautical mile will be different depending on where on the globe you are measuring.

Words are not enough. But that is my take on it. Since little depends on accuracy in regards to knots I may have missed a bit. Others may have a better description. But miles is the more accurate term because a mile is the same distance no mater where you are on the planet. So if you sell a boat internationally, like MacGregor Yachts does, you are justified in using miles in promotional materials.

Second, there is no such thing as knots per mile. The per mile portion is part of the term knot.

Third, as long as wind is reported in MPH instead of Knots, miles will be more significant to the modern sailor than knots. Don't blame me, take your weather reporter out for a sail and explain the problems they are causing. Weather reporters have folks thinking gale and storm are interchangeable terms. I am confident the French and the metric system are the root cause of the problem But more to the point, MacGregor Yachts has figured out that miles per hour conveys more meaning than knots. This no nonesence approach is but one reason they sell so many boats.

 

Søren Flening,

how excellent to have you posting. You do know I set a hook for SA's do you knot? We really should keep this fun.

This thread is about Mac26x cruisers and not TP52s. Nonetheless, there can be comparisons and contrasts. TP for transportable was also suggested. I have learned most recently from hull number 2 of the Cantalina Morgan 440, which I had the pleasure of boarding last Saturday. The boat was transported by truck from Annapolis where she created a stir.

The most significant observation about the 440 is the "new deck salon". This is a very Mac26x like innovation. In fact, I would say it is a copy. The term deck house, I think is a better term. Dog house wouldn't do, trunk cabin is best, but anyway blame the French, this monohull has French styling and this styling impacts the angle of vanishing stability. Acording to Sven Donaldson in Pacific Yachting, the voluminous trunk cabin itself insures that the angle of vanishng stability is bound to be exceptionally high. As goes the 440 so goes the Mac26x.

Off course 440 on the Internet means clueless - ie URL not found. I see these things and think the marketers must have known that and named the boat purposefully. Connecting dots is fun. Are the Catalina folks clueless, or have they come around to thinking like MacGregor Yachts.

The Catalina Morgan 440 doesn't plane. She is large enough to make her fast enough to avoid the hazards modern reporting points out, without planing. But she also has a 75 HP motor. This makes the 50 hp on a Mac26x look reasonable doesn't it? It appears that one of the big objections to the 26x design involves the motor. Get over it. Rightsized motors are the future of yacht design.

There is an observation that was pointed out to me by an engineer favoring long thin bulb keels. He showed me that the Center of Gravity (CG) of a design when the boat is at rest is lowered with less weight when the weight is carried low on the end of a long keel. I was not quick enough to ask

Do you always want the CG low? It seams to me that in light wind, in the kind of wind where you have your crew sit on the lee so that gravity will fill the sails, that you want your CG higher than afforded by a long bulb keel. I do see that on models like the 440, the shoal draft boats are heavier than the maximum draft boat. But this is owing to a lack of hull form stability, in otherwords a compromise on a compromise. To bad the 440 isn't a swing centerboarder. She would be a true upgrade from a Mac26x in that case.

 

Knots

You said,
“Lets give you the real skinny on knots. First a nautical mile is not the same distance every place in the world. This is because it is more a measure of time than of distance. The time it takes the sun to travel degrees on the sphere of the earth. Because the earth is not perfectly spherical, a nautical mile will be different depending on where on the globe you are measuring.”


This may be the least of your problems, but a nautical mile is always 6000 feet and it is never less or more. It is 6000 feet at the pole and 6000 feet at the equator. The thing you may be thinking of is a minute of longitude, which may be, in some places a nautical mile in length. A knot is always a number of nautical miles per hour.
All the best,
Robert Gainer

 

Good Morning New York,

Identifying crap is difficult if you are worried about being fashionable. I mean can you really see the crap if you do not take off the $250 sun glasses? Can you see it in a boat design like the TP52s if you do not run the math? Now these Piece of Crap (POC) Mac26x vessels have been dumped all over the world. 5000, POCs and you are just stepping into it? What took you so long? Fashion changes but sound design remains sound over the ages. When Watson got into sailing there was an expresion that you could not have both a racing design and a cruising design in the same boat. The chairman of IBM promptly proved that incorrect. No Crap! Almost all of his boats were and are currently acceptable for cruising.

I have to let you all know about Ralph Lauren and Filsons. Use www.dogpile.com. Out of dog crap comes greatness. Anyway. Filsons has been making foulies for real sailors since the turn of the 18th Century. Today, you are unlikely to find a dock worker in Seattle not using Filsons. If you shoot ducks or hunt, you know about Filsons. Lauren of course is in the process of launching a new spring collection of sportswear specifically designed for the demands of sailing. Problem is that until you start finding sailing in the sports section of Barns and Noble instead of the transportation section, what good is a sportswear brand?

In anycase, there is about to be a battle between Ralph Lauren and Filsons for the soles of the American Sailor, which are currently full of crap they have stepped into and I am not talking about the Mac26x POCs because few have stepped there. It will be a battle of the fools vs the practical. Tommy Hilfiger, a great New Yorker and hell of a nice guy from what was told by his neighbor last week, is also in play for this space. A former Ralph Lauren executive now owns Filsons. Damn, I hope he is a sailor. Levies should also be in the mix. There is tradition in Filsons and Levies for sailors. The Laurens and Hilfigers and even Prada are hard pressed to show such tradition.

Think man Think - The Chairman of IBM proved something. How did designers get so far off from the 1950s. They were on track then. Go Cal 40s

 

Frank, people don't get killed by 2-knot air. We're talking about seaworthiness, the ability to survive a gale without turtling. Not to mention speed in a breeze.

 

I thought you said it changes every five years.

wb, I think you have your answer.

 

Cut and paste action:
The majority of the values listed in the above table refer to land miles of one variety or another, but the system of "knots" used at sea equated to a different mile in its own right--the nautical mile. To understand the nautical mile, we need to explain a related unit called the geographical mile. A geographical mile is probably the most scientifically derived mile. It is a unit of length determined by one minute of arc along the Earth's equator, which is approximately 1,855 meters or 6087.15 international feet in length.

To better understand the concept, imagine slicing the Earth in half along its equator. Now divide the perimeter, or circumference, of this circle into 360° segments. Then divide each degree into 60 equal segments called arc minutes. The length of one of these arc segments, 1/60th of a degree of the Earth's equatorial circumference, is a geographical mile.

The nautical mile is almost exactly the same concept, except that it is equal to one minute of arc along a great circle of the Earth. A great circle is a circle on the surface of a sphere that has the same diameter as the sphere. What does that mean? The Earth itself is an imperfect sphere since it is slightly flattened at the poles. If you were to measure its diameter at the equator and its diameter at the poles, you'd find that the equatorial distance is greater by about 142,181 feet. Because of this difference, a geographical mile along the equatorial circumference would be 6087 ft long but the same mile along the polar circumference would be only 6066 ft in length. The great circle of Earth instead assumes that the Earth is actually a perfect sphere, and the differences between the equatorial and polar circumferences are averaged out.

When the definition of the nautical mile was specified by international agreement, its value was based on this idealized Earth so that it is the average of one minute of arc in both the equatorial and polar planes. The nautical mile is therefore slightly shorter than the geographical mile and is defined precisely as 1,852 meters or 6,076.115 international feet.

from http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/history/q0139.shtml If anyone cares

 

You are comparing a 45' 25,000lb cruising sailboat to the Mac26X??? You are comparing a 75hp DIESEL to a 50hp gasoline OUTBOARD???

Take another drag on your crack pipe and write some more for us!

 

Sorry to burst your bubble. Most of the "internationally" world uses kilometer (km) as a measure of distance.

Gentleman of the forum, I retire from this post and Mighetto's wisdom. I suggest you all do the same. I want to grow old sane

 

Skippy,

Frank, people don't get killed by 2-knot air. We're talking about seaworthiness, the ability to survive a gale without turtling. Not to mention speed in a breeze.

Seaworthiness refers to keeping the vessel right side up. A boat that turtles may be more seaworthy than other designs if she can be righted quickly with minimal or no damage.

The Swan owners make a big deal out of this fact because a Swan can turn turtle without damage and at least one confirmed that fact.

It is when a boat turns and a cabin or fin or mast or portlight is ripped off creating a hole that there are seaworthiness problems.

I just love the fact that the new Swan, the one that will carry the NYYC brand name, is a keel centerboarder. I hope the Catalina 440 is so modified. You see, no amount of wind has been shown to knockdown, let alone turn a vessel with 110 vanishing stability. It takes a long fin that can be used as a lever in concert with sea action to do that. One can say :wind doesn't kill; long fins kill by tripping the vessel in a wave. With the NYYC brand boat and Mac26x cruisers, you have the option of retracting fins so they can not be used for killing.

Of course crew is a function of seaworthiness. Good crew will have sailed or motored from harms way owing to the fine weather reporting available in the modern age. There really is little reason to expect that a boat that can make 9 or 10 MPH or knots (take your pick) will sail in extended gales. Of course everday the Comox weather station predicts them when I am sailing. It is important to have a boat that can heave to or lie ahull well. Anyway, gale is less than storm, we really want boats that survive more than gale and more than storm. We all want huricane class cruising boats, and fortunately for all of us that is possible with proper construction, materials, and design and it has nothing to do with cost.

The Mac26x cruisers are strong not only from the deck salon design but also because they are small. Smaller really is stronger. That is the reason that when a boat capsizes (and all boats in sufficient sea can capsize) you get into smaller Mac26x like (some of them water ballasted) life boats.

Lets remember that sailors get killed in light air just like in heavy. Tacking a boat gives the boom a chance to crack heads in light or heavy. I have often wondered when helmets would become required equipment for racing. But truth is that until helmets are required in your auto, they should not be required on sailboats. The risks really are higher in the auto.

 

Glad to see the smilies. We Hate the French for meters. How dare they measure the globe so the line would go through Paris and then take a platnum bar, call it a meter, and require the rest of the world to use that as the standard. I am blinded by the wisdom of the kilometer. The measurement would be different if the line went through Seattle.

I am nonetheless glad this came up. The French imparted their measurment wisdom with platnum because of the aura of value. There is a company here in Washington state that makes titanium springs for aircraft landing gears. It recently became prominant in motorcycle racing because it figured out how to apply the springs to motocycles. But seriously, does a titanium spring really make a difference or is it more associated with making the rider feel like everything has been done that can be to allow him or her to win. If the price of titanium were less than iron would they get that same feeling?

MacGregor Yachts explains that the cost of its X model is not low. Rather, other manufacturers are getting the purchaser to overpay for warm fuzzy's (also called unnecessary marketing) at best and at worst, inefficiencies in the design and construction.