The perils of edgy design offshore

I'm not buying the rigid split between engineering and art. It's never been that black and white. In fact, engineering can validate good art -- and often the simplest, most practical solution to a problem is also the most aesthetic.

 

The Mary Rose had a successful 33-year career as a warship, before sinking for still-disputed reasons. Maybe you should come up with another example... like the Vasa.

 

Yes they cannot see the whole picture. The artist cannot understand the physics without some study but the engineer can be an artist as well without studying art.

It's dangerous when an artist replaces knowledge with opinion.

As Troy said above a functional design has its own beauty.

 

It goes both ways in the same proportion imho. Even art requires some study which shouldn't be underestimated.

Just like understanding physics and math require a considerable amount of effort, reading and elaborating of lots of (sometimes very abstract) concepts, so the art requires (besides an innate trait of creativity) a study of the history of art, an ability to take an apparently ordinary stimulus from the surrounding world (say, a vision of a tree or a feeling of sadness/happiness) and then elaborate and transform it into an original and often very abstract creation. Not a task everyone can do.

Cheers!

 

Someone should have told that to Leonardo.

 

I don't know why this USSailing report has everyone worked up.

As far as I can tell USSailing has no authority to do anything. They produced a very diplomatic document without doing any real scientific work. They have been careful to not draw some conclusions that might not be popular and have tactfully avoided setting up one of their member clubs for a potential lawsuit.

Some people are taking the reporting in the report as dead-on facts. That is a mistake.

I know two of the people involved with the report. I have met at least two others. I'm sure they took the task they were given seriously. But let's not mistake the output for anything more than what it is.


PS: Nice to see people referring to the designer again as OH. He may not have designed the best boat, but he sure wasn't trying to cut anyone's head off.

 

This seems like a pretty accurate statement. But not just race monohulls, most modern monohulls are from this family (albeit with more freeboard).

I have not seen any evidence of this. Can you provide links to the projects?


OK, back to your war with MJ and AH.

 

No Paul, no war, we've circled the same course, same wind, half a dozen times, got repetitive, maybe a little boring ... but there has been fractional progress, agree to disagree, for example, and a flicker of compromise?
One of the projects I'm thinking of is the 27 foot half model that Vladimir Murnikov is working on.

 

There were something like 23 deaths in offshore multis from Australia and NZ within an 18 month period, and at least one inshore death around the same time.

That is a horrific toll of human lives snuffed out, at least sometimes apparently in the slow torture of drifting aboard a wreck. It left dozens of others without sons, daughters, husbands, brothers and fathers attracted some opposition to the boats that had such a high loss rate.

To blithely ignore the human toll and instead attack those who tried to prevent more people spending their lives without their loved ones is callous and cold-hearted in the extreme.

You may not care if people die, if widows are left grieving (my mother was pregnant with her fourth child when my father was killed on an early multi) but thank goodness some people do care about such things and do raise concerns about safety.

 

That is a far larger number of losses than I remember but you'll know more about it than I will. I remember Hedley Nicol and 2 crew in his own trimaran (Cav mk 11 will know the details) plus Lock Crowther's brother and three crew aboard Bandersnatch, the first Kraken 33, (purportedly a whale hit I read). There was a Piver tri that capsized in a Brisbane/Gladstone with crew lost as well. No-one is dismissive or blithely ignores lives lost at sea - (you're offcourse there CT) but brave pioneers and adventurers, knowing what they're getting into, sometimes do.
My point was that all these designs went on to become very successful and fast boats; the savage bad mouthing by critics notwithstanding.

 

Were they the exact same designs that went on to become successful, or refinements of the original designs based on learning from the failures?

2 very different things there.

PDW

 

I have a particular concern about stylists who are largely ignorant of the technological side. Historically their efforts have been very mixed.

A lot of Naval Architecture isn't intuitive, stability is a classic case. The losses of life were staggering in offshore vessels until Naval Architecture became a science. The boats looked good and adopted their own regional styles but the deaths were nearly always attributable to unsuitable design, but they were inevitably attributed to providence.

When people depart that science and pretend it doesn't apply to them they reap the consequences. Wingnuts is a classic case IMO it's stylish, huge decks for a little boat, batman like and looks cool. Style sucks people in to believing the vessel is robustly designed or maybe fast. But it doesn't produce a robust vessel nor the fastest one, that's where art falls short. It's the science that produces a consistent design either directly or indirectly through scantling and stability regulation.

Art as in boat style requires no formal study. It should also be limited on a boat to above the waterline, art for example has no place in say designing a foil for low drag or choosing a Prismatic Coefficient or a displacement. Even above decks the stylist is constrained by the hull shape, mass distribution, deck function windage and the practicality of use.

Functional design is good for example a no frills 'Communist Russian' style boat aircraft or even spaceship still has it's own beauty and style, none of their engineers studied art outside of their early schooling.
Most naval vessels never had a stylist near them, their designs were entirely driven by practicality yet again (so long as it's not the fleet oiler) they have their own functional beauty.

But we all have the ability to change a few lines here and there and maybe change the sheer of the bulwark or the slope of the cabin top well aware that subtle small things completely change the style of the boat. Doesn't that make us all artists?

In contrast the stylist/Artist seldom produces a successful boat first time without either learning the science themselves or seeking input from someone learned. Also if you are producing a radical new hullform I'd argue art has absolutely no place in the design at all, not until you came to design above the sheerline.

 

The loss of the Piver 46 Waka Toru, which left Botany Bay on August 18 1968, cost 8 lives alone - the owners, three completely inexperienced women who had paid $1000 for the "luxury voyage" in a boat that had never been trialled offshore, and the three children of the owners.

So of course some people campaigned against the craft that caused such loss of innocent lives. To ask questions and demand more development before children are killed is surely completely reasonable.

Yes, some people went over the top in attacking multis, but Piver and others were bizarrely over the top in their outlandish claims in support of them - witness Piver's ridiculous claim that one of his boats could surf almost around the world on one wave.

If some people stepped forward and said "ban multis" - and those who did were a tiny minority on the objective evidence currently available - then that is not evidence that they were "mouthy pundits" - they could have been (and IMHO largely were) intelligent, reasonable people who were trying to take action to prevent horrible lingering deaths and the almost equally terrible plight of those like the Quirk family, next-of-kin of one of the Waka Toru crew.

Valerie Quirk's sister haunted Sydney docks, trying to find news of her sister. Her father even wrote to the Emperor of Japan to get fishing fleets to look out for the tri. Of course such tragedies made reasonable people demand action. I cannot believe that you cannot understand that it is reasonable to do so in such a situation and can only throw your usual insults.

 

The Perils of Edgy Weather in Any Boat

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Wingnuts had a design flaw that compromised safety-that is established. But in 99% of the conditions she sailed in she was ,very, very fast.

 

You have to finish to be fast (old adage from my granny)

But Wingnuts had more than one design flaw, it had a poor combination of design features that made it an unsafe boat. Granted in smooth water on the right heading it was a performance boat but in the fleet that day it wasn't doing that well for all it's compromises, before the accident.