Interesting. Any idea how the "fix" works? Is it only valid if the freeboard(?) height is more than the max half beam, or can you push it a little?
As Dolfiman notes, a good definition of a "fair" hull may be lacking. I've taken it to mean that you don't wind up with a bulge or a dimple...
I've noticed some small hollow areas as well. The problem seems to be that while the curves are infinitely differentiable, if any one of them has...
Thanks for the link to the paper. It's another great look back into the early days of computing.
TANSL, I don't think this is likely to compete well with current CAD programs either, but I thought it would be instructive to see what Letcher...
John Letcher got a PhD in Aerodynamics from CalTech in 1966, sailed across the Pacific six times - twice single-handedly in a 20 ft boat, formed...
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...
I have a desktop CNC machine from Inventables that seems to be using Bezier curves to generate the paths.
If you have access to Matlab there's B-spline GUI on the FEX: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/27374-b-splines that shows how...
EK, I don't know if the professionals use anything like this, but ever since I came across this paper by John Letcher "A New Approach to...
groper - Thanks for posting the resistance/speed graph. That's very nearly linear, which means that power is only a quadratic function of speed.
Nice video - thanks Moondog! I just downloaded Free!Ship and will try to estimate power requirements from that, but a real resistance curve...
CatrigCat - An even bigger problem than trying to keep the panels clean is that the batteries add a significant amount of weight. I'll just have...
Here's a first attempt at battery sizing. The available solar power is a sine function of the time of day, p(t) = pi/6 * sin(pi*t/12). The...
Richard - Great videos and that pedal powered propeller is really cool, too. It's fun to think about how much you could get from solar power, but...
Richard, your experience with pedaling a 35 ft catamaran is a great example. The power required at hull speed of 8 m/s is 19.8 kW so the...
Here are the details of the calculations for a 12 m (40 ft) boat. The available solar energy at the collectors is at least 4 kWH/m^2/day from the...
Stumble, I think you might be confusing power with energy. At the Earth's surface the peak power is 1050 W/m^2, but to get energy you need to...
For a 40' (12 m) boat, you need 28 kW to maintain hull speed which I agree is out of reach for solar power. At that length, the width is 5.5 m and...
That's kind of what I was thinking about. Just go when the sun shines, and not too fast so you can enjoy the scenery.