18' Trimaran vs F18 Catamaran

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Chris is dead wrong on most of what he says regarding this boat. I know you don't cotton too much to them thar pesky calculations and thats too bad. I've been in the boat business for 40 years and have designed and built my own small tri's as well as many other boats including the tooling for two production full size boats and a dozen RC models. As I said above, production boats based on my design have sold over 300 boats....

 

Re Hutu's and Tutsi's
Here's how it works these days..
All the Nacra's and all the AHPC boats are either built by Indonesians or Thai's workers via contact builders....
All the current AHPC boats had paid designers, some of the Nacra's have ( as the range includes both old and new designs)
Some of them had FEA done to confirm integral design and layup
Very few if any had paid design on rigs and beams, builders experience usually works there.
All the new boats went from drawing to CNC plug/molds
Building went out to tender.
The aluminium is not produced in the same country as the hulls
Nacra use polyester and vinylester
AHPC use Vinylester and epoxy ( not on F18) and have never used polyester not even polyester gelcoat ( hence a 20 year old AHPC boat looks as good as one made today)
Foils are built with a cutting edge technique with epoxy foam injected into high pressure molds...nice but very hard to repair!
Both sets of owners are very experienced sailors with plenty of high level international trophies to prove it and in more than one class.
Neither builder has a presence where the boats are built....

 

Oh how easily they will turn on those who offer sound advice in a neutral fashion. Loyalty has to be earned, my friend. It can't be bludgeoned from the crowd that surrounds your latest thing. Suggesting that Andrew hasn't read the material you have posted is tantamount to calling him stupid and I can assure you that he is not.

So, I'm dead wrong, even though you have not proven your case. That's an interesting take.

Going on to spout your version of a personal resume is telling in its own fashion. One could almost think that you don't have any confidence in what you put forth.

The original premise of this thread was for a trimaran, Doug. You know, one of those boats that uses all three hulls to get around. Now, in true, Doug Lord fashion, you have steadily morphed the thread title away from what we all know as a trimaran and off you have gone, predictably, into a fully foil-borne craft that was not even on the table at the beginning, save your relentless need to turn all conversations on this list into foiling discussions.

You pulled a non-foiling recreational family boat (Virus Magnum 18) and clumsily suggested that it served as an example of price point potential in the argument. It does not.

 

I just realised I was on the water the other day with some Magnum 18's..yuk flanged hatbox design like a hobie 16, 200kg, heavier then a Nacra 20, mast section for cross beams, couldnt get out of its own way was competing against plastic hobie getaways....
If i'm thinking tri I would start with a Seacart 30
(PS M23 is so cheap its hard to believe though and you can blow them away with most performance beach cats)
PPS I will have the oppurtunity to line up with a Seacat soon so I let all know how it goes versus a beach cat

 

Hence my tongue-in-cheek suggestion that the only way to offer this boat at a competitive price point as suggested, is to crash one's way into the last, non-exploited manufacturing base on the planet.... Africa. Never mind that the process will require "incentives" that First World maunfacturers are likely unwilling to pay at such low volume production numbers. Never mind that the low wage areas of the Dark Continent are the last bastion of truly dreadful diseases and living conditions.

Somehow, some way, our hungry need for mountains of cheaply delivered goods will force its way onto the shores of the former slave trade nations and we will get that tricked out, er, "trimaran" for what it costs to make a Magnum 18. Of course, the Magnum folks will go there, too and then the process of not being able to build this boat for that low price will start all over again.

Look out Mars... you're next.

 

Looking at a Magnum 18 I thought they were already being manufactured on Mars or from earth but 40 years ago
PS what does "composite glass/polyester" mean on the build spec of the Magnum on the ahoy web site?
code for straw and mud?

 

What makes you think that I agree with an over-blown, excessively complex, fiddly set-up hobbled, gadget-ridden and high maintenance beach boat concept that will set a new standard for expensive boats that nobody will buy?

I believe in a different, production boat paradigm, Doug. The one that has shown the only steady sales figures for small sailing craft in the last ten years.

Keep it simple to use, simple to own and simple to buy. Make design forays into uncharted territory in incremental hops and not wholesale leaps into oblivion. Educate the buying public well ahead of time about those same incremental design evolution developments.

Speculative R&D is not the same thing as a commercially produced boat. It's fun to experiment every once in awhile and it should be done to work through new ideas. However, that process costs big dough, as well as time and not many small time manufacturers can afford to toss those components away from their business plan.

Like I said way back at the start of this thread.... Prove it! If you think that this boat has merit, Doug, then get off your behind and build the first one and show all of us that it's viable. Until then, Mud has hit the nail squarely... this is all "Just words" and a heap of numbers?!

 

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Like I said:

Note: while the above quote backs up what I said it should be noted that the Gougeons built a C-Class trimaran 18' wide and 300lb(same weight as a C Class cat)that beat C Class catamarans way back in 1969!

 

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1) Yes you are and I have proved my point 100%. The Magnum was simply the only 18 footer I could find that would establish any kind of price point for a trimaran. I explained EXACTLY how the Magnum info was used and used my extensive professional boat building, design and production experience to come up with a realistic price(at the bottom of post 61) for the trimaran that is the subject of this thread. A trimaran that only uses 60% of the power available to it so that it beats an F 18 with the crew sailing in comfort.
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2) Here you're either being silly or deliberately making a false statement to mislead readers or both. Your statement is UNEQUIVACABLY FALSE! Unless, of course you consider an ORMA trimaran , a Catri trimaran, BMW-O USA, the Nacra 20 and others "fully foilborne craft".
They are most certainly not "fully foilborne craft" and neither is my proposed F18 killer tri!!! The maximum weight supported by the ama+ foil version is 70%-the exact same as an ORMA tri. And the ROH ama, at maximum speed, supports 100% of the weight of the boat.

 

Geez, last I checked a C-Class ride was not 18' LOA. Is there no end to stretching the truth to which you will not stoop?

 

Doug, Sid is a oneoff - noway do I consider the thing going into production. A word in your shell-like ear, I've seen what goes into building production boats, through being a yachting journalist for many years, visiting factories, talking to the builders and writing articles, and also from working at Cooksons' for a year as a boatbuilder (not that they do production boats, I just wanted the experience of working for possibly the world's best, not that I was any indication of their quality work) - and you can have it, the headaches of setting up production with everything ground down to absolute simplicity to save expense .... and your rotating ama, stepped floats whatever, whatever, would be a boatbuilder's nightmare. You don't listen to anyone, do you?

 

What is this all about?

Of course one could build a tri that is faster than an F18. That should be easy.

One could easily build an 18' cat that is faster than an F18.

What would be the point to building either?

The F18 is a relatively heavy, medium-to-low tech craft, so as to be buildable at a reasonable production price point.

The F18 is at the max trailering width allowable in most places. Make a boat wider and you have to de-mount, or fold, or tilt. That adds time consuming nonsense to beach cat sailing. The whole point is to roll off the trailer, sail, and roll back onto the trailer and home.


If I went down the street to Pete Melvin and asked for a design for a cat or tri to be faster than his F18 he would happily draw it up for me. He would not do it for free. I could then go across the street to have Lynn at Westerly build the thing, or have Gino build it, or even Dencho. None would be as inexpensive as a production boat. I could get top notch sails from Jay at Glaser sails.

Then what would I do with the thing? There is no class to sail that boat here.

There's a good A Class fleet, and currently all the hotshots are sailing F18s getting ready for the Worlds coming later this year.

There is an offshore multihull class, but this boat would not be accepted as it would lack the accomodations required.

There is no Portsmouth fleet.


I suppose it is easier to start this useless thread and argue with people about nothing rather than show the progress on the previous project.

 

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No. No one with the "no can do" attitude you seem to favor when it comes to me and what could be a perfectly viable project. No sir, I absolutely do not listen to uninformed comments that use genealizations that do not reflect the specific points that have been addressed in detail on these pages.
I have no intention of putting this boat in production though I'm 100% positive that it could be done based on many years experience in the industry. No question about it.....
However, if I get the opportunity I may build one for myself.....

 

The Little Cat That Could

... And when the Capricorn folks heard that Douglas Lord was comparing a non-existent foiling boat to a conventional sailing catamaran, they quickly assumed that it was just fine to make up things for purposes of comparison and gloatage...

Their answer was to foil equip the Capricorn, go to an even lighter rig, lighter hardware and composite layup schedules and add serious amounts of irrelevant fluff to their marketing claims. The prevailing attitude at the Capricorn HQ was, as long as it's OK to make up stuff out of thin air, well then, we might as well join in the charade just for fun and make something up ourselves.

Never mind that the rig wouldn't last one season in racing conditions, never mind that the hardware only exists in our minds, never mind that layups of the type we are suggesting would snap like a ginger cookie... we have the answer and once again, we have a boat faster than Dougie’s vapid effort to compare apples and oranges with the most strange set of comparison bonafides ever seen in the sailing industry. Really Doug, a Magnum 18?

Strictly as a confidential exception to this reporter, Capricorn allowed me to see the all-boron, nano-tube boat of the future which can be delivered for less money than the Magnum 18, complete with helium filled, integral hull chambers that have been certified as meeting the NASA criteria for gas containment. When launched, the new boat will not even touch the water's surface and only lightly, once the crew has climbed aboard.

If you remember back to the first Star Wars movie, when Luke Skywalker stood beside his land speeder out on the desert, the dang thing was just floating there... yeah, you get the picture. We've expertly tuned the new Cap with the proper weight distribution so that it just hovers, waiting for you to turn loose the magic and blow away any pesky waterborne trimarans you may have seen in the imagination of others.

Hey, there shouldn't be any complaints, right...? Dude opened the door to the outrageous, hasn't ever been built, category and we simply walked right through with a Doug eating grin.

What, you want to know about price and how competitive might be our new craft compared to the other multihulls out there? Let's see, I've got that data right here on one of these pieces of paper. Uhhh, nope, not that one, uhh, yeah! Here it is. I punked around on the Internet and found this model of the Landspeeder, (see below) 'course, it's only a rendering here, but they say it can be made as a plastic model for USD$49.95 retail. Now, if we apply an extrapolated weight coefficient to the mass of the projected final production model's weight and give it a value of .58556 and multiply that times the inevitable flux capacitor effect (yes, we will be running a flux capacitor, but please don't let anybody know that) Well, anyway, we wind-up with a comparable number that we pulled out of our butts and, surprise, it comes in at considerably less cost and 2/3's the weight of the trimaran…. And may we add, it has twenty-two times the available power.

If you take that weight and ratio the value along with the power available from the flux engine and the rig and the aero compliance structure, you come to a figure of 62 knots, peak speed in any conditions... Yes, I said, ANY CONDITIONS!!!! You got a smooth bit of water... 62 knots. Beach launch right from the parking lot completely avoiding the launch ramp chaos... 62 knots! Breakwater in the way as you choose to go back home... no problem, it's 62 knots! Blowing like stink with the Coast Guard tucked away for the duration... I give you, 62 knots!!! The better, more comfy, faster, far simpler to maintain ('cause we said so) and wow! What a beauty to behold.... as the beach boat of your dreams.

Any questions?

Clearly, gentlemen, it is game set and match.

Aftermath: These last words echoed off the walls of the yacht club as Doug Lord scuttled away to dream-up another fantastic expression of his righteous disconnect from reality...beaten again by superior intellect and a forceful sense of humor from the gang at Capricorn.

 

OMG!!!! the very same post and now it's up there, what, five times?

How very creative.