Peoples Foiler II-the newest boats

I think you are wrong, the more a boat "sails itself" the more of the skipper's attention can be "out of the boat" and racing. Even if after hours of practice manual control becomes second nature, some part of the brain must be focused on boat adjustment, that reduces the available processing time for tactics and strategy. Nowhere is this more important than in single-handed sailing.

In a crewed situation the goal is to remove the driver from the boat and sailing controls so that 100% of his attention is on racing decision making. Every extra manual adjustment reduces the capacity for other things.

Only in a "I'm just mucking about" situation would manual control be of value. And then, only for people that want to turn their boat into a marine version of a low-rider and make it jump up and down to impress the girls.

 

I may be wrong but I think its worth looking in to.

 

Your own words explain why manual control is not the way to go. If you were building a boat you were trying to get the highest top speed out of for a limited distance, it might be worth exploring. However, we aren't. We are talking about a boat that is raced around a course, maybe for hours each day.

Any system that needs hours and hours of practice to be able to use cannot be good for racing. You have consistantly refused to answer what will happen during the times you cannot concentrate 100% on keeping the boat flying. What happens when you look ove your shoulder, looking for the windward mark which is lost in waves. You aren't paying attention to the waves for, say 5 seconds. Or, what happens when you have close boat handling at a mark and you suddenly have to avoid a boat you haven't seen. It is at times like these that even the greatest sailors make mistakes and it is why we spend so much time trying to make rigs automatic and as simple as possible.

However, what you want to do is to make the most difficult boat there is even more difficult to sail. It makes no sense. You can sail around the course 2 or 3 knots slower and beat a boat that has a capsize! Another example is that failing to pull off a foiling gybe loses maybe as much as 100 metres!

Again, I fail to understand how this can be so. You say you want to link the rudder and main foil yet the link between them isn't constant. Sometimes you need the 2 foils to alter the same way, sometimes in opposite directions. Often, you need to adjust one and not the other and finally, you need to be able to adjust them by different amounts. That sounds pretty complex to me. The advantage of a well set up wand is that it sorts out the main foil as a concequence of everything else you do in the boat.

Why are you so unable to accept that this has been looked at and dismissed? You even quote examples of manual systems which have now been abandoned.

 

Well, thats interesting. Most sailors that are serious about racing already spend a good deal of time practicing. There are are lots of people who say windsurfing takes lots of practice to get right. I'm sure the pilots of the aircraft in the Reno air races practice a lot to allow themselves to race effectively.
It seems to me that a manual system that eliminates the dragging wand reduces weight and complication even with a main + rudder foil combo.
My limited experience with it on my boat was positive even though,at first, the system didn't work too well.
I've talked to both David Lugg and Alan Smith who were responsible for the manual control system on the first two person bifoiler and they both said the system worked well.
As I said: it's worth looking further into it-and I am.

 

Since you are still at the point of being able to foil at all, I can see where you might think that manual control will work. It might ... for someone that just wants to foil at all.

Take two guys, first happy to foil at all. One of them spends 50 hours learning to control the boat. The other spends 50 hours tuning an automatic system.

Lets say that the manual control guy gets to the point that only 15% of his attention is needed to trim the foil system. The guy with the automated system needs 0% of his attention on the foil system.

Guess who is going to win races?

I know you are a clever guy, and I admire what you have achieved with your RC boats. Take your known successful foiling tri, and convert it to manual control on a separate channel and see how much harder it is to sail. You will not be able to look ahead of the boat as much as you can with the automated system, the same is true of 12" = 1ft scale boats.

Having a manual override for stunting makes some sense. But refusing to use an automated system for basic stability is insane.

 

Two guys in Gainesville added 100% manual control to two Rave multifoilers. In terms of work load this is most interesting because on the Rave(like the F3)
manual foil control means control of the boat's altitude and RM(roll control).
Very little to no input is necessary on the Rave or F3 for pitch so the primary
workload is altitude and roll. And according to them the boats worked well and were frequently raced.
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John Slattebo(designer of the Raptor) on manual control:
[4 Mar 01, updated 3 Nov 02] I designed several manual controlled foil stabilized outriggers. From the first one it was plain to see that manual controlled full foilers was the way to go to generate performance all around the course. Sailing is just too dynamic not to have manual controls. I invited Greg Ketterman to sail my boat proposing to change his tri-foil to manual control but he explained that for he was working on larger designs where this might not be possible. I think it is inevitable. Let me know if you are interested in more details as to how we controlled them. I have several designs and several published articles about these boats. Last article was in Multihulls March/April issue. A Yahoo search for John Slattebo will reveal two more. -- John Slattebo (raptor16@sbcglobal.net) website: (http://hydrovisions.com/)
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Doran Oster's Manual Altitude Control System for the Rave(for his boat and Hollis Cafee's boat): http://www.doranoster.com/pdf/Hand-Controls-for-Rave.pdf

 

Doug, you refuse to address civil, logically stated opinions and respond instead with hearsay and 6 year old quotes from a guy that sells these:



I think you and others here have the ability to think 'out of the box', but sadly it appears that you cannot look at your ideas objectively when trying to apply them practically. I think that is a shame, since it keeps people from taking any of your ideas seriously. It puts you into the same club as the whale bumps on foils and golf ball dimple drag reduction guys, and I think you don't deserve to have your ideas dismissed that way.

I give up.

 

Did you read the Oster pdf? You know I think it is a damn shame you would be so dismissive when manual control has been used successfully on two monofoilers and two multifoilers. That should, at least, suggest that it is an area worth more investigation. So be it....
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Doug

Cotton sails and wooden spars were used sucessfully in the past and even metal mast and woven sails more recently. However, that isn't a reason not to use carbon masts and film sails today.

I accept that IN THE PAST people used manual control but that was before decent wand systems were around. Manual was tried on Moths but abandoned.

Finally, please stop quoting stuff on the Rave. You have argued that the Rave proves nothing for bi-foilers and you cannot have it both ways. In the case of manual control, the very fact that the sailor sits in one position all the time and can cleat the sails makes manual more practical than on another type of boat.

 

======================
Thats not true! The Rave wand systems were being sold before the first Moth
sailed using a wand. In fact,the new planing wands developed by Bradfield were available when Oster was racing.
Ignoring the potential of manual control is your choice but you may be missing an important area of development.

 

Wow, talk about delusional. The weirdo who scrapped his non-foiler instead of spending time on it to make it work is telling others they need to spend hours and hours to verify another of his loony ideas.

The fact that other people are bulding working foilers and sailing them is definitely making this kook even kookier. The frustration of knowing he will never achieve their success has sent him over the edge.

Drug boy, the best thing for your mental health is to never read this forum again. If you don't see others succeeding where you could not you might not feel like such a failure.

 

Doug, it sounds to me like you should spend more time sailing and less time "manually controlling" your wand.......******.

 

Doug,

This is the acid test? Two mono and two multi foiling boats out of what, 750 boats built over the last ten years? What would represent an area of investigation would be... if any of these boats could routinely finish in the top five of a group of well-attended racing events. Routinely Top Five, Doug.

The rest is obsessive fiddle. Mildly interesting, but still fiddle.


Doug, has the well gone dry and you just want to keep these foiling threads afloat, no matter what it takes?

 

Wacky foil idea

G'day

I stumbled across this on the net and you guys have piqued my interest. Many people now seem to be playing around with hydrofoils espicially after the foiling moth gave gave hydrofoils so much publicity. But another concept to speed sailing is to have a sail boat that literally flys. Not on hydrofoils but on airofoils. As high speed sail boats approach 50knots they are nearing the take off speed for light aircraft so the basic idea is.

1. A sail
2. A wing that will generate enough lift in the air at top speed to lift boat out of water.
3. small centreboard for lateral resistance.

The control system to stay airbourne would be difficult but this solution would reduce drag, and not have the same problems as cavatation in hydrofoils.

I know this is a bit of a wacky idea, but what are peoples thoughts?

 

Go to www.monofoil.com I think that may be similar to what you describe.