AC 36 Foiling Monohulls

David I have never solely or even largely blamed the AC for sailing's woes. I have addressed the hyped-up claims about its impact on sailing, and I have used it as an example of the way that high-tech high-speed racing does not filter down and increase participation, as is so often claimed.

Many over the top claims were made when the AC changed to cats and foilers. It was said that the change from monos would cause "a dramatic change" in the sport, making it "more extreme and much cooler". (Coutts, NY Times). It was said (same source) that the change would increase participation and make sailing an extreme mainstream sport. Other people here keep on hyping up foiling. Should we ignore the huge gap between the claims and the reality? Should we perpetuate the thinking that has harmed our sport so much?

The issue of technology and participation in sport has been the subject of many years of research by academics from universities from the Sorbonne to Sydney, and I've done many years of study on the history and technological development of the sport and the relationship with participation rates. I am currently, for example, going through Snipe class bulletins of the 1940s and 1950s to see how they grew participation rates in a time of technological change. To name just two other sources, Michael Hutchinson's work on the sociology of cycling, like that of Bijker and Pinch, provides interesting parallels that also show the issue with the current AC and the related thinking about sailing.

Why should the lessons of the history of the sport and the studies of academics on sports participation and technology be ignored in a topic that asks about the impact of the AC?

 

It certainly made that change for the AC, making it more extreme and much cooler, and some of that reflects on down to the smaller foilers that are beginning to make a real impression on the sport, even when the numbers are low. It is possible though that people not involved in sailing who might be open to getting into it might see these foilers and think "wow", but then when the see the reality of the costs and realise that they can only afford a floating tub, they aren't going to find that as interesting as they would have if they'd never seen any foilers, so they decide to stay out of the sport until they have more money so that they can enter it later (if they're ever able to afford to) with a foiler. However, the same could apply to them seeing 49ers in the Olympics and then finding out the they can only afford a 2nd hand Laser. To avoid such disappointment, any class that looks too exciting would have to be kept hidden so as not to risk overselling the sport. Alternatively, we need to change the performance of ordinary boats to reflect better what's happening at the top end if it's really the case that these new boats are harming the sport by pushing up expectations.

When it becomes more affordable, it might yet increase participation and put flocks of foilers everywhere big enough to host them. The hype is primarily about the future, and it may not be hype - everyone agrees that it's more expensive than traditional sailing (which is a major barrier to its uptake), and that won't change until designs settle down on the best foil solutions and the manufacturing of those foils is automated (robotics with artificial intelligence will slash those costs a decade from now by removing people from the manufacturing process). You can't put the genie back in the bottle - people have seen foilers and they want a piece of the action. There is no question that it is spectacular, and the public has seen what can be done. The way forward is to make foiling as affordable as possible, and the sooner we home in on ideal designs, the sooner that will happen. If foiling isn't a big attraction, it can't be harming sailing because it simply won't register with people, but you think it (or its promotion) is doing harm, which means you need to identify the mechanism for that harm being done. If it's because it's attractive (and makes ordinary boats look dull by comparison), then trying to bury it isn't the best course of action - the way forward is to build on it. The next AC will be spectacular, so it will again be promoting foiling, and, just as before, this will be ignored by some people while others will be inspired. Creative minds will continue to explore new ways of flying and reducing the costs, and foiling will become more popular. Hopefully we will end up with new designs of dinghy designed to be good in displacement mode (with hydrofoils left at home), and good foilers (when they're fitted), and the designers of these future craft are watching the AC boats and other foilers with great interst. The foiling revolution has not yet begun - it is still stuck in a protracted prototype phase, but there are plenty of signs that this will change, and the only question is how soon.

 

In my view, a foiling monohull is simply not practical, unless it is small enough to be dominated by just one or two human bodies.

A larger one, and especially one with a ballast keel, is all but doomed to be a much poorer performer than a multihull one. This is simply due to the nature of the beast. A multihull foiler can move its human ballast (which can be roughly proportionate to its size) to the extreme opposite side as that of the working foil.

In order to get a similar righting arm, the effective Beam of the mono (which includes the extended foil) would have to be nearly doubled.

So, now we are talking about a fake monohull, which is really a trimaran, with foils replacing its floats.

The whole thing seems utterly ridiculous to me, kind of like a flying dump truck.

Add to this the fact that these foilers usually have to operate in a very narrow range of wind and sea conditions, and you have something which might impress go-fast hipsters and technical geeks, but is going to leave most of us sailors cold.

There will, of course, be foiling boats available for reasonably affluent sailors, and I welcome them. Making sailing a bigger tent is never a bad idea.

But these boats will have very limited appeal because all they can do is go really, really fast. They can do nothing else. Their performance is tightly linked to their sail area/weight ratio at a very unforgiving level. A little extra weight may cause a total failure to fly.

The same extra weight on a conventional mono, or even a conventional multi, usually means a slight reduction in performance.
So I can load my conventional mono or multi with picnic or camping gear, even if it was original intended only for racing. I can then off load this stuff and race it again. In other words I have multiple uses for the same boat. Having at least two such uses makes its purchase far easier to justify.

If I add to that the ability to sail in a wide range of wind and sea conditions, I have further justification for the money I spend.

Now, getting back to the AC competition.

In my view it is about five principles: head, body, heart, grandiosity, and general relevancy.

With "head", I mean the design of the fastest boat, under the present rules and limitations. Such rules and limitations should be both soft and hard. Soft ones include a general design rule which usually trades one go fast characteristic against other, where more of one means less of another. The 12 meter rule is a good example of such. Hard ones are very specific limitations, such as a limit on ballast, for a keel boat, for example. These limitations are usually intended to control costs.

With "body", I mean a racing crew which is highly respected and at the top of its game.

With "heart", I mean not only a design team and crew, which is determined to win, but a wide base of fans rooting for them.

With "grandiosity", I mean boats and people who are a bit bigger than life. The foiling multis, of the last two competitions, certainly fit that bill. Who would have thought that a machine could travel across at highway speed, while powered only by the wind?

With "general relevancy", I mean boats and conditions most sailors can identify with. This is where, in my opinion, the foilers fall down. Boats which require airplane wings and can only sail in a narrow range of wind and sea conditions, may well meet the first four principles, but fall far short of the last.

A foiling monohull, which is even more expensive than the foiling multis it replaces, and is slower and clunkier to boot, seems to be a poor choice.

But foil assisted monos are far easier to defend. They can operate in a wider range of conditions, are generally cheaper than a foiling mono, but have a bit extra pizzaz. They also share most of the characteristics of more ordinary monos.

 

Current foil–assisted monohulls are only marginally faster than non–assisted monohulls on certain points of sail and slower on others. The slower part is fixable, but only by fully retracting the foils. So quite a big backward step from the AC50s in terms of pure speed.

The proposed AC75s are a contradiction to the design criteria of more relevant and cheaper, I don't think they're either. Lower cost seems to be about limiting design and test spend rather than making the boats themselves cheaper. But I don't make the rules! Whatever they end up being, I'll be watching, and hopefully there will be some lessons that make their way into other foilers.

 

I have identified the mechanism for the harm many times here. It is identified by the two biggest studies of the public perception of our sport ever carried out; one by Laser/Sunfish, one by Gemba for Yachting Australia. Both those studies said that the general public do NOT think that sailing is boring, but they DO think it is inaccessible, difficult and expensive. No one who has significant monohull foiler experience yet has pointed out a realistic way that a foiler will not be less accessible, more difficult and more expensive.

Windsurfing has been held up by many people including industry leaders, academics and journalists as a classic example of the issue that foiler hypsters fail to recognise. In the early years, windsurfing was promoted as a fun, low tech and simple way to go sailing any day at your local beach. From about 1983, the "funboard revolution" started and "funboards are the future" was the message. Funboards (boards designed for high speed in high winds) were great, but they also intimidated huge numbers of people, including potential new windsurfers. They knew that they could not handle the new boards, which took more rigging time, needed more open water, and were oriented much more towards top speed. The sport became much faster much of the time, much more spectacular in some ways, and much less popular in every way. Some sources put it at 8% of its former size.

The New York Times noted the effect. Kitesurfers noted the effect - as kitesurfer Chip Foreman noted, "in the beginning everyone could windsurf. In the end, nobody could". Manufacturers slowly noted the effect. Academics noted the effect (link). The leaders of the plastic kayak movement noted the effect; as kayak pioneer Tim Niemier said "windsurfing got too technical". Top yacht marketers noted the effect, as they have told me in personal interviews, because I actually do original research. The inventors of windsurfers noted the effect - see what Svein Rasmussen, CEO of Starboard, has said. Guys like the head of our national windsurfing association noted that non-sailing kids on the beach were intimidated by the high-tech gear but not by the old-fashioned stuff. But most of them noted it too late.

Windsurfing proved that promoting high performance can almost kill a sport. One must also acknowledge that if dinghy and yacht sailors really wanted pure speeds, they would have got into windsurfers, multis and kites years ago. Most of them didn't because most of them prefer practicality and don't actually really care about pure speed.

Saying that some new materials and new manufacturing technique will solve the various issues with foilers ignores the fact that these materials will be used for other consumer equipment as well, therefore there is no reason why foilers should become affordable when compared to other water toys. It also ignores the issue that there is no proof that such materials and techniques will appear in practical form within a practical timeframe.

May I ask whether you have found any practical way in which cheap and practical rigs can handle the enormous range required of a foiler's rig? Have you used many high-speed rigs? Have you ever sailed and owned a craft which has high-wind foils and light-wind foils? Have you checked whether such craft are rising in popularity compared to simpler ones that use just one set? Have you checked the accuracy of previous hype, like the "canting keels are the future" and "skiffs are the future" fads of a few years ago?

 

I can't come to terms with the unnecessary weight of the leeward foil and with the inability to reef the main sail.

 

I try to put figures on that, by this Foiler asssited / Non foiler Imoca performance comparison from the last 4 events, considering only the boats last generation & top sailors in position to win :

Transat Bakerly 2016 (with upwind + downwind conditions) :
1st and 3rd are foiler asssited : average time 12,42 days
2nd and 4th are non foiler : average time 13,21 days
>>> average speed advantage ~ +6% for the foiler assisted, but the 2nd was less than 1% slower than the 1st

To note that the 2 first Imoca 60 where a bit faster than the two first Multi 50.

Vendée Globe 2016-2017 (with mostly downwind conditions) :
1st 2nd, 3rd and 4th are foilers assisted : average time 76,82 days
4th and 5th are non foilers : average time 80,31 days
>>> average speed advantage ~ +4 % for the foiler assisted
But to note that the 2 best non foilers (PRB / V. Riou and SMA / P. Meilhat) were obliged to abandon, being third not far from leaders at this moment.

From the daily observations, one could note that the speed advantage for foiler assisted is mostly visible when boats speed are over 18 knots, up to 2 knots faster when speed are in the 20-24 knots range, meaning an average maximum of 50 NM / day advantage.

Defi Azimuth 2017 (240 NM coastal race with light winds, upwind + dowdwind conditions)
1st and 3rd are non foilers : average time 20,73 h
2nd and 4th are foiler assisted : average time 20,95 h
>>> average speed advantage : ~ +1 % for the non foiler

To note that the same result was obtained for the "Tour de l'île de Groix" shorter race, win of the non foiler with a speed advantage of about 0,8 % / foiler assisted.

Jacques Vabre 2017 (various downwind conditions, light and strong winds) :
1st, 3rd and 4th are foilers assisted : average time 14,09 days
2nd is non foiler : time 13,58 days

>>> more or less equivalent, the foiler asssited 1st being just + 2% faster that the non foiler 2nd .

To note that the 3 first Multi 50 were faster than the first Imoca 60, at the contrary of the Transat bakerly.

Sources :
Transat anglaise 2016 — Wikipédia https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transat_anglaise_2016
Ranking and race data - Vendée Globe https://www.vendeeglobe.org/en/edition-2016/ranking-and-race-data
Défi AzimutDéfi AZIMUT IMOCA 2017 https://www.defi-azimut.net/
Cartographie et classement - Transat Jacques Vabre 2017 https://www.transatjacquesvabre.org/fr/cartographie-et-classement

 

Thanks for the factual analysis, Dolfiman. It's excellent information.

Would it be fair to say that the Delfi Azimus and JV 2017 would have been more similar to the conditions that most boats normally sail in? . The normal transatlantic races would seem to put the emphasis on long distance straight-line speed off the breeze, especially in stronger conditions, whereas most boats spend most of their time competing in about 9 knots and going upwind and downwind with a lot of short tacking, accelerating and gybing. It would be very interesting to see how a fully crewed foiling Open type would perform around a typical Solent course, in the sloppy waves off Sydney, or in the light breezes of Long Island Sound.

 

I forgot to add the Fastnet 2017 results for Imoca, did two handed (0nly very short daily races are done fully crewed with Imoca), and there again short victory of the non foiler SMA, ~ 2,5 % faster than foiler assisted St Michel :
Imoca - CLASSEMENT DE LA ROLEX FASTNET RACE 2017 https://www.imoca.org/fr/news/1924-classement-de-la-rolex-fastnet-race-2017.htm

 

Thanks for your work Dolfiman, I think it confirms my generalisation?

The foil–assisted boats are somewhat hampered by class rules, they'd likely go better if they were allowed additional dagger boards to address leeway downwind and allow them to fully retract the foils upwind. But 4 boards (2 straight, 2 foil assist) plus canting keel plus dual T rudders is getting to be a lot to manage, maybe OK in an ocean race but you'd need a full crew for short course stuff.

It will be interesting to see how control systems develop on the AC75s. I wonder if ETNZ–style game controllers will be allowed? Or whether there will be dedicated foil and sail controllers operated by different crew.

It will also be interesting to see if anyone builds a surrogate boat under 12 metres as allowed by the rules, seems to be a cheaper way to get a prototype and do some testing before finalising a full–sized design.

 

You simply design boats that can fly for those who want to fly, but which also cater for people who have no intention of fitting hydrofoils at all and which perform little or no better in displacement mode than existing monos - the performance gain that I was referring to would come entirely through flight. It's easier to visualise it with cats, of course, because there are already good foilers around which are little changed from their non-foiling equivalents. There's a big psychological difference between buying into a platform that's foiling capable and one that isn't - if you were able to buy the former, you would know that you can buy the hydrofoils much later on and sail exclusively in displacement mode until that time, but if you buy the latter, you simply can't upgrade without replacing the boat. It may also be possible to make new versions of some older designs with changes to make them foiling-capable while still fitting in with class rules when used without hydrofoils, but it's bound to be easier to start with a clean slate. Incidentally, I'm envisaging the foils being located on (or beyond) the sides of the boat rather than in the middle, so in flight mode it would behave like a foiling cat, while the boat can be kept more stable even if the crew are slow to shift their weight about (by having the windward foils work to keep that side up if the crew's weight is too far out - this already works with T foils, but I think it could be achieved with passive foils too).

Also, there are many clubs which don't allow cats because they don't have enough water for faster boats, and they aren't going to be helped by higher-performance monos making their ponds smaller. What's needed is boats that are more versatile, fitting in with what we already have, but extending the range of what's possible in other situations.

"May I ask you again what fast craft you have sailed on the typical waterways used by leisure small craft sailors?"

I have never sailed anything faster than Wayfarers on any waters (and I have zero interest in making those fly - they are heavy beasts which certainly won't adapt).

"...most of them prefer practicality and don't actually really care about pure speed."

I agree that pure speed isn't a big draw for most people, but a pleasant and useful amount of extra speed could be enabled by adding hydrofoils, and the aim with monos should be early flight and a dramatic increase in speed at the low end (once up on foils) where it's safe and maximally transformative if you want to be able to cover more distance when cruising. What you want is to have two boats in one for much less cost than buying two different boats to cover the same range of capabilities.

"Saying that some new materials and new manufacturing technique will solve the various issues with foilers ignores the fact that these materials will be used for other consumer equipment as well, therefore there is no reason why foilers should become affordable when compared to other water toys."

If cost is a barrier and cost comes down, more people will buy.

"It also ignores the issue that there is no proof that such materials and techniques will appear in practical form within a practical timeframe."

Just having designs settle down to something that's hard to improve on (such that mass-productions becomes possible) will enable automation to bring the costs down. You simply can't attempt to do that when the designs keep changing and only small numbers of each are produced. That's why the direction the AC boats are taking is disappointing - it's not going to help home in on better foil designs for practical boats. I would have liked to see them switch to passive foils, getting rid of all the complicated control systems.

"May I ask whether you have found any practical way in which cheap and practical rigs can handle the enormous range required of a foiler's rig?"

There is nothing to stop a boat having more than one rig with the more expensive one being used when foiling, but where the aim is for relatively sedate foiling with early flight, it really shouldn't be an issue. In stronger winds, smaller sails would be used, again keeping speeds in a sensible range.

"Have you ever sailed and owned a craft which has high-wind foils and light-wind foils? Have you checked whether such craft are rising in popularity compared to simpler ones that use just one set?"

The aim would be to forget about high-wind foils entirely and be happy that the more dangerous speeds are avoided - more drag from light-wind foils has its advantages. Of course, if someone really wanted a set of high-wind foils and was prepared to pay for them, that would be up to them - it needn't be accommodated by class rules.

"Have you checked the accuracy of previous hype, like the "canting keels are the future" and "skiffs are the future" fads of a few years ago?"

I've always regarded canting keels as a nightmare because they (or the part of the hull supporting them) were always breaking and letting water in in every televised round-the-world race I ever saw. Skiffs don't appeal to people who aren't keen on regular capsizing, and that's most of your ordinary sailors (who don't even want to go out on a wire) - if they wanted to swim, they'd be more likely to try windsurfing. Neither of those things ever looked like "the" future, but both have their place and they were the future of that place.

 

David, if you have not sailed anything faster then a Wayfarer then you have not experienced many of the issues involved with fast craft. These include the reaction time, the forces involved with crashes, the rig loads, and the issue of making a rig that can create enough lift to drive the craft you envisage at lower speeds and also has low enough drag to drive it at higher speeds. Your post didn't address the issue that even when fairly sedate speeds (for a foiler) are involved, a cheap and practical rig appears to be problematic because of issues such as gust response and lack of CLR control. Oh, and if foiling and going fast is so great, why haven't you done so?

Similarly, if you have not sailed a craft with multiple foil sets (and that covers rigs and water-foils) then you have not experienced the issues involved. These include the problem of trying to select the right foil for the conditions; the expense of the extra foils; the problem of using a foil out of its intended range; and the fact that foils designed as part of a set that will be changed to the conditions are different to foils designed to handle all conditions. These are significant issues. What happens to your sedate foiler with its practical rig and light-wind foiling foils in when a thunderstorm blasts across Long Island Sound, or a nor'easter on Lake Macquarie comes in gust 30 knots instead of 17?

Perhaps you should go out and experience craft that encounter these sort of issues before you decide that they are negligible and that, implicitly, those who have been unable to solve them are lacking vision or skill. Many of these issues are simply inherent in complex high speed craft.

If you "simply design a boat for those with no intention to fly" and allow it to be fitted with foils, as I understand it you are adding significant extra structural cost because of the very high loads involved in foiling. You are also going to end up with hulls, platform and foils that are not going to be optimised for either end. The reason that these issues exist is not because designers lack vision or have any other cognitive defect, but because of the simple physics of sailing.

Re the idea of avoiding dangerous speeds - taking experience of peak versus average speeds we can say that if your hypothetical craft will average 15 knots or so to Rockall, it will normally be doing about 25-30 when it gets a gust and a wave. That is NOT a safe speed to crash. Same thing when your "safe and slow" foiler gets a gust funnelling off a headland. Even the slowest production foiler crashes at dramatically higher speeds than the most popular sailboats, and hurts a lot more when it does so.

Re "If cost is a barrier and cost comes down, more people will buy." Arguably that's not true, since cost is a comparative issue. In many ways current sailboats are often cheaper than old ones in pure inflation-adjusted terms, but the industry says it's getting resistance since other consumer items have come down in price much more. As one example, when an OK Dinghy cost as much as a colour TV, lots of people bought OKs. Now that an OK costs many times as much as a colour TV, more people are opting for the TV.

The relevance of skiffs and canting keels was that many people hyped them up as the future of the sport, just as they are hyping up foils and just as they hyped up funboarding. Since they were wrong at least three times before, the chances are high that the hype is wrong once again.

I notice that you apparently had no reaction to the example of funboard windsurfing and the negative effects of "technological overshoot" as it's been called. Why ignore that precedent and its dangers?

 

You're inventing imaginary problems. Non-foiling boats already have to deal with the same conditions in stronger winds where their speeds get into the same range as foilers in more moderate conditions, and if it gets too hot trying to foil in strong winds without reefing, you need only set the foils for zero lift and stop foiling to turn the boat back into an equivalent non-foilier. You learn how much your boat is designed to take and you stay within those limits. You don't insist that the foiler handle the same range of conditions in foiling mode as in non-foiling mode.

"Oh, and if foiling and going fast is so great, why haven't you done so?"

Where have I said going fast is great? Going faster in moderate winds certainly has a lot of appeal, but when you get to speeds where bad accidents can happen it has rather less.

"What happens to your sedate foiler with its practical rig and light-wind foiling foils in when a thunderstorm blasts across Long Island Sound, or a nor'easter on Lake Macquarie comes in gust 30 knots instead of 17?"

What happens to any boat in that situation? Having the ability to foil doesn't require you to blast along on foils in a storm without reefing. As soon as you set the foils for zero lift, you're in the same situation as everyone on a non-foiler.

"Perhaps you should go out and experience craft that encounter these sort of issues before you decide that they are negligible and that, implicitly, those who have been unable to solve them are lacking vision or skill. Many of these issues are simply inherent in complex high speed craft."

You're still twisting my words, taking them from one context and applying them to others. And you're making objection after objection even though there are obvious answers to them which you should be able to see for yourself. What is it that makes you so determined to attack the idea of adding foiling capability to boats so that they can foil in suitable conditions without being forced to foil in unsuitable conditions? You're just nit-picking around the edges and ignoring the normal situations where comfortable flight is there for the taking. Suitable conditions for flight at many locations are common. In some places they may be rare, and if conditions in the places you want to sail are rarely right for foiling, you simply wouldn't buy anything that can foil if there are less expensive alternatives, and that means you'll buy what other people in your area are sailing. That is not a limitation that would apply to everyone though, and I doubt it would apply to the majority.

Also, you must have seen video of the foiling Optimist - given that a wholly unsuitable design of boat like that can fly well with that simple rig on it, where are the real limits? Before that was demonstrated, if you'd said an Optimist would never fly in anything less than a gale, most people would have nodded, but even that pig has now flown. I'm not talking about building foiling pigs though - that hog merely shows that physics has given us a fair bit of room to work with.

"If you "simply design a boat for those with no intention to fly" and allow it to be fitted with foils, as I understand it you are adding significant extra structural cost because of the very high loads involved in foiling. You are also going to end up with hulls, platform and foils that are not going to be optimised for either end. The reason that these issues exist is not because designers lack vision or have any other cognitive defect, but because of the simple physics of sailing."

No - you would be building a good compromise instead of trying to maximise speed at the expense of other factors. You aren't necessarily adding significant cost by adding more material in highly stressed areas. It's clearly costly to convert a boat that wasn't designed for flight, but if you're designing for flight from the start you'll put in extra strength where it's needed and add it in ways that don't add greatly to the amount of work involved. If the boat ends up being a bit heavier than an equivalent non-foiling boat, that isn't as important for flight as we used to think. If you've got more weight, put a bit more sail on it if necessary to compensate. If the wind's strong, reef or use smaller sails.

"Re the idea of avoiding dangerous speeds - taking experience of peak versus average speeds we can say that if your hypothetical craft will average 15 knots or so to Rockall, it will normally be doing about 25-30 when it gets a gust and a wave. That is NOT a safe speed to crash."

Firstly, 15 knots is a good bit faster the 15mph I mentioned, but averaging 15mph is also far from a requirement on such a trip - that was just an illustration of what might be possible in ideal conditions - a 10mph average would get you there and back in a very reasonable 36 hours. (It is also likely that you wouldn't be looking to do a straight there and back - I'd be more inclined to wait for conditions where the whole thing can be done without sailing to windward, making a 90 degree turn at Rockall and landing somewhere hundreds of miles away from the start) .

"more people are opting for the TV."

If the TV's really such a draw, then maybe that's what you should be blaming for the decline in sailing. The fact that we now have a generation of adults who grew up addicted to computer games after spending a long childhood spent under constant imprisonment may also be a factor. Many of them are a different species.

"I notice that you apparently had no reaction to the example of funboard windsurfing and the negative effects of "technological overshoot" as it's been called. Why ignore that precedent and its dangers?"

Because it has no solution - if that's how it happens, you can't do a thing to stop it. But I don't think it's the whole story. It was, for a time, trendy and cool, but it's now old hat. It was really never much more than a passing fad. People eventually realised that standing on a board for hours and spending a lot of time swimming in sewage wasn't really so great, and it didn't get them the chicks either.

 

So to summarise;

1- You have never studied what happened in windsurfing or apparently windsurfed, but you know more about it than the people in the industry and the academics who have studied it. It's odd to claim on the one hand that there's no way of avoiding the catastrophic impact of technological overshoot when in fact there are clear ways of doing so, and on the other hand claim that there are easy solutions to major physical problems when there are no clear ways of doing so.

2- You have never sailed a boat that goes as quickly as a slow foiler and apparently never done significant offshore sailing, but you know how small foilers could be handled on offshore passages and that the current problems are just caused by a lack of vision.

3- You have never built a boat for even low foiling speeds, but you know that it can be done without causing other significant compromises. The expert engineers who have done it so far are all wrong, apparently.

I'm not twisting your words and applying them to a different context. I am taking your concept and applying it to the real world and using the experience of people who have actually done this sort of stuff, and the issues that arise.

When talking about words being twisted, one may note that the issue with the TV is not people watching them - I never said that- but the change in their relative price over time compared to a dinghy.

Some of us happen to respect those who have proven ability in their field, and to want to learn from them. Since you have no experience in the relevant areas and don't appear to accept the knowledge of other people even in a field that they have spent working years in and in which you have no experience whatsoever, it's not worth continuing this.

 

You and your "expert" friends did not solve that problem - you merely came up with a dubious explanation for what happened and were powerless to prevent or undo it. Now that there's been a collapse in windsurfing, it should be possible to learn from that, get rid of all the high-tech stuff and go back to the beginning to spark a new wave of it, but you know that that hasn't happened and that it won't happen. Perhaps if you could go back in time you could ban the high-tech stuff and try to save the sport's future by preventing people from seeing things that look a bit more exciting, but just think how negative that approach would actually be. It simply couldn't be done. The reality is that the sport was overly popular for a time, and then fell back to find its natural level.

You now try to extend that case to foilers and seem to imagine that hype about foilers (which, incidentally, most people are blissfully unaware of) is damaging sailing. It isn't. You are simply appealing to authority (your experts), and completely ignoring the fact that authority (and experts, even good ones) is frequently wrong, which should be obvious to everyone given how much they disagree with each other in every single field of study. Your experts appear to have been running more of an exercise in blame allocation than anything genuinely scientific, and all they've come up with is a hypothesis which they can't prove. In my own speciality (for which again I have no qualifications whatsoever), I'm up against a host of experts with lots of letter after their names who tell me that what I'm actually doing in computational linguistics is either impossible or decades off in the future, but I just get on with building something that works while they waste their lives arguing with each other.

You talk about there being no easy solutions to major physical problems, but all the big problems in the way of the kind of foiling boats I've been talking about here have already been solved. C-fly already has the required pitch-stability that I seek (untroubled by waves). The S9 already has good stability sideways, to the point that it will continue foiling away for many minutes with no one on it after the sailor has fallen overboard. The Q23 has shown that a keelboat can fly despite the extra weight (and despite leaning over to leeward). Some non-foiling cats have been converted into foilers. Some non-foiling monos have evolved or been converted into foilers. All of these imagined impossibilities are actual things that have been realised. You are merely a purveyor of negativity who makes one invalid objection after another for reasons of your own (which are doubtless good ones, but not necessarily rational). It's fine to question things, and useful too, but one of us is flying in the face of more facts than the other, and that isn't me. I'm projecting ahead to something that's only a short distance from what we already have - a different mix of proven ideas. The most difficult part to achieve is getting the costs down, but I know from my AGI work that the technology to make this happen is not something ridiculous from science fiction, but something that's actively under construction. There is, for example, only one module left to write and a bit of minor tweaking before I can demonstrate natural language programming.

"2- You have never sailed a boat that goes as quickly as a slow foiler and apparently never done significant offshore sailing, but you know how small foilers could be handled on offshore passages and that the current problems are just caused by a lack of vision."

And there you go again, behaving like a troll. The "lack of vision" bit related to designers of boats failing to provide one very specific kind of functionality which could have been given to their boats with small changes which would have made a negligible difference to the cost, but time and time again you keep twisting it away from that to cover other things where I have made no such accusation. That is not civilised behaviour.

"3- You have never built a boat for even low foiling speeds, but you know that it can be done without causing other significant compromises. The expert engineers who have done it so far are all wrong, apparently."

The Q23 is a boat for low foiling speeds which makes good compromises by not fixating on high-end speeds. It doesn't provide the best performance when racing round a course, but there are some trips it can make in some conditions where it will be considerably faster than it would be without the hydrofoils. Gains of that kind are certainly attainable, and well worth having if the costs are low enough (which they clearly aren't yet - like with anything else, it needs mass-production to fix that problem).

"I'm not twisting your words and applying them to a different context."

You have been doing exactly that.

"I am taking your concept and applying it to the real world and using the experience of people who have actually done this sort of stuff, and the issues that arise."

I am taking my concept from real world examples which show what is already possible, plus projecting forward in a very conservative way, but also in one more contested way where I have inside knowledge of what's under development.

"When talking about words being twisted, one may note that the issue with the TV is not people watching them - I never said that- but the change in their relative price over time compared to a dinghy."

If people are unable to afford to buy a boat that they could have bought if they hadn't spent the money on a TV, what does that tell you about their priorities? First of all, most of them have multiple TVs in the house already and are adding more and more giant ones to their collection which are in no way cheaper than older TVs. What are they doing with them? Where's the big draw? And why isn't all this new expensive big-screen technology killing off TV? Your argument doesn't transfer, and that's another hint that it's entirely bogus.

"Some of us happen to respect those who have proven ability in their field, and to want to learn from them. Since you have no experience in the relevant areas and don't appear to accept the knowledge of other people even in a field that they have spent working years in and in which you have no experience whatsoever, it's not worth continuing this."

Well, you've got the last few words of that right, but the rest of it is akin to a religion with a lot of worship of status going on. For you to prove yourself and your expert friends right, you'd have to revive windsurfing and show that it can become popular again with all the high-tech side of it banned. I don't think we'll be seeing that any time soon, or any time later either. For me to prove myself right it's much easier as it will happen all by itself over time. Boats will appear with a better package of existing capabilities to do the very things I've discussed, costs will fall as the designs settle down to the point where mass production can make a big impact on reducing them, and intelligent machines will have removed people from every step of the manufacturing process within a decade. It's still a long wait for some of that of course, but I made one big claim that can be tested a lot sooner. I hope to be able to demonstrate natural language programming within a couple of months, but I can't guarantee that as there are invariably complications which could potentially make it drag out towards as much as a year, but one year isn't so terribly long. So, if I haven't demonstrated NLP by the end of this year, I'll never post on any sailing forum again.