34th America's Cup: multihulls!

34th AC

Re-discovered this accidently tonight-simply spectacular-TNZ 5 days in:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_dBbb9-R50

 

Gary- are you thick or something? Your post has no relevance to this thread whatsoever. You are hell bent on stirring trouble and nothing else. Where the heck are the monitors here? We cannot allow this most interesting topic get high jacked like this. Please get rid of this guy!

 

OK guys, if you want to jab at other posters or make rude remarks, please take that to another site.
Let's please try and get this to be a productive thread that everyone can enjoy taking part in and stay away from further unnecessary insults and vitriol.
Thank you.

 

Doug, thanks for the youtube videos. I don't have time to watch the full hour one at the moment, but I saved so I can watch it again later Thanks for the thread! It is exciting for me because I have never seen a professional boat race, although I have seen dinghies and a speed boat race out on a lake. It is so awesome to see the multihull foils come to life!!!

 

everyone uses illegal designed parts during testing as its the way to gather data.
They would all say that and RC did in one interview as its normal.
What the conspiracy is if they worked out the boat only works with the illegal part and cant via the box rules and want it changed but the others have made the box rule work.....well then??

 

For those that have stated or implied that the new rudder is a desperately needed fix to the OR effort, I have some questions.

Since OR have been using the new rudder since early June, do we have videos that show drastically improved performance. I think not.

The new rudder elevator minimum size is expected to increase drag and slow down the OR & AR boats. It may help with jibes, but this is not a given and jibes may not be the deciding factor.

However, given how new 72' in shore racing cats are, there is some uncertainty in what it takes to avoid a PP. OR is willing to race with smaller elevators, but they probably understand that the new larger elevator does provide some improved margin against a PP disaster. Note that this improved margin is not needed just because of foiling. The best description of the AR crash was that it was PP first, then structural failure. And this was for a non-foiling boat.

Given how many posted about the safety risk for these boats, can we honestly say that the larger minimum elevator was not worth being pushed for by the safety review committee?

Now, if you are going to push to make OR & AR increase the size of their rudders elevators at the last minute, is there any fair way to do this. Just telling them to upsize them even if a decent planform does not fit is not really very fair is it. Since upsizing is sure to add wetted surface are and drag, they are taking a performance hit even if they go symmetric with tips out past max beam.

Again, if all 37 rules are implemented, AR and OR are being told to make their boats safer with a feature that slows the boat down for everything except possibly a jibe.

The sad thing is the protesting teams are not being asked to change their boats, and the other two team are being asked to make their boats slower.

It is almost like ETNZ/LR and their supporters want OR and/or AR to race with a higher risk of PP than really required just out of spite.

 

The key question is: Who instigated the amended rudder rule? IM alone? I cannot see him arriving at this independently. It must have been a result of proposals from one, some, or all the teams. We don't even know the basis of the 2 pending protests yet.

No configuration is illegal before racing starts. Having adjustable foils and rudder configuration is sensible surely, to find the right balance. It would be quite normal I would think to use configurations outside of the class rule in the interests of understanding better the entire process. Once understood one would tweak things to fall inside the rules - unless a door opens to allow an amendment.

TNZ were sailing very nicely before the first 'race' and appeared to do so during. Will all this ranting and its result make too much difference to the result? I am beginning to think, no.

 

Short version-

Put it this way - you seem to be promoting foiling composite carbon-sparred wing+film sail multis as the future of the AC, but all those features (and the modern cat and cat racing in general) were created in the countries you claim to be full of people with a conservative attitude towards sailing. Conservative people do not create such innovations. So maybe it's not a case of crooked northern conservatives and enlightened progressive southerners, but smart and good people everywhere?



Long version -

OK, if we change the period in question to the '50s*/early '60s then the Brits and Americans created the enormously influential concept of an international offshore championship (the Admiral's Cup); Sopranino and the MORC/JOG concept; fibreglass production yachts; offshore one designs (L36, etc); the modern cat heralded by the Shearwater, rather than earlier stillborn versions in other places; 'glass SMOD dinghies; cheap ply family boats like the OK (a US commission), Heron, GP14, etc; fin and skeg offshore boats of 52'6" LOA and just 17,000 kg displacement or 48 feet and just 6,600 kg displacement as early as 1951; small offshore fin and skeg ULDB 32 footers of 2043 to 2217 kg in '54-'57; dacron and nylon to replace cotton sails; alloy hulls; singlehanded ocean racing; C/S/K and the creation of the modern offshore cat; Piver, Kelsall and the modern offshore tri; speed trials; sailing foilers; and wing masts.

Imagine sailing with none of the above, and then wonder how it can be said that such countries were too conservative.

In terms of NZ specific designs, you say yourself that the Stewart 34 is "absolutely identical" (does that mean copied, by the way) to a Rhodes design. Vim looks very similar to a 1960 YW Diamond. So where is the evidence that the Brits and Americans were conservative?

The Diamond, of course, was created by Yachting World to make sailing cheap and accessible as were many of the boats they promoted. It was used as an offshore AND inshore racer in the UK. A mag that promotes a boat called the "YW People's Boat", a dinghy promoted by a left-leaning paper (the Mirror); is that evidence that boats were status symbols for the rich dramatically more than they were in NZ and Australia? Yes, down here we had a more egalitarian social structure but that just highlights the innovation, grit and verve that many Brits and Americans showed when they introduced boats for the masses.

British sailing included characters like Uffa Fox (no more need be said) Patrick Ellam (who chased the offshore fleet in a blown-up International Canoe), Illingworth (whose autobiography is full of drinking tales and indicates that there was a fair bit of bonking going on with the women in his crews), Jack Holt (a tradie who created designs for the media, big publishers and upper middle class), Beecher Moore (a wealthy businessman who was passionate about reducing the cost of the sport), and many others who were NOT conservative.

I have huge respect for the Manders and I love Peter's book. However, I think he got his facts wrong in some ways in his claims that UK dinghies were behind. Yes, for some time the Rs, Gwens and 14s were more advanced than their northern counterparts but there are always times when one area is ahead or behind in some ways, but they are aimed at different markets and sailed in different conditions. Mander mentioned the Snipe as an example of a slow boat, but that was always aimed at a different audience - one which Aussies (and perhaps Kiwis) were slow to get to.

The best northern boats of the era, like the lightish ply Hornet and the 505, were fast and highly advanced and the skiffs and similar southern boats were often beaten by them. Peter wrote that he enjoyed the Sharpie, and Graham confirmed that to me. Similarly, Geoff Smale said that the Int 14 was a much more advanced boat than Xs, IAs etc.

Therefore any claims of northern inferiority or conservatism do not seem to tally with the hard data. The AC is not a battle between the enlightened south and the nasty conservative cheats up north.


* I'm using some 1951 stuff as well because of the sources I have available.

 

CT, I agree with a lot of what you say ... but I can't go into detail responding ... because Michael the sensitive patriot, the new arrival, has ordered me to desist.
Maybe we could shift this to another thread, say historical monohulls - which has gone quiet.

 

"The sad thing is the protesting teams are not being asked to change their boats, and the other two team are being asked to make their boats slower.

It is almost like ETNZ/LR and their supporters want OR and/or AR to race with a higher risk of PP than really required just out of spite."

Mr. Flados, I think you are missing some very important points.
The other two teams are NOT being asked to make their boats slower - they can duplicate ETNZ's rudder design and it will comply with the proposed rule change, the reason they need to add the non-legal rudder elevators is because their boats are configured differently and will not work properly with class-legal foils, so in effect it is these two teams who must have requested this change, rather than being forced to implement it.
Paul Cayard has been quoted as saying that, without this rule change being implemented, their team would be excluded from competing. He is not really being truthful - all it would exclude them from doing, is being remotely competitive.
This is not as a result of the original rule somehow treating them less fairly than the other competitors. It is as a result of their own engineers and design team coming up with an approach to get a non-foiling design to do something that it wasn't designed to do, and they can't acchieve it without the proposed rudder design and weight increase that ETNZ and LR are opposing.
They could use their non-foiling daggerboards and sail the course in a safe manner by not pushing their badly designed boat to it's limits. (there is no current rule implying they MUST bring a foiling boat.)
They could also cut off 10m of their wing if they feel their design is prone to pitchpoling, the rules only stipulate a maximum wing height, a smaller wing BY CHOICE is legal, and would make their boat safer.
The choice to withdraw from the event would be purely to save face and blame it on the other teams lack of "sportsmanship", covering up their poor design choices.
I don't know how this would all affect OR, but some reports seem to concur that OR foils and transitions much better with the non-legal equipment - fine if they intend to use the next 2 months refining it to fit into the rules, not so good if they are behind the push to get the illegal equipment somehow included in the safety recommendations, and by default becoming the team with the most amount of time to refine it. If this were the case, lack of "sportsmanship" would be stooping to a whole new level.

ETNZ and LR are fully in their rights to ask the jury to uphold the class rules with no changes if they feel that through intelligent design within those rules, they have created a safe boat that can be pushed really hard and has amazing performance. Your premise that "It is almost like ETNZ/LR and their supporters want OR and/or AR to race with a higher risk of PP than really required just out of spite." is probably correct, though not out of spite, rather out of a desire to ensure that the "safety recommendations" are not used as a tool to enforce rule changes that might reduce the advantage they currently enjoy THROUGH INTELLIGENT DESIGN WITHIN THE RULES. And it is probably not so much a desire for them to race with a higher risk of PP, than a desire to make them back off while ETNZ/LR can push their boats hard, thereby ensuring they retain the advantage they have THROUGH INTELLIGENT DESIGN.
Being the America's Cup, design and boatbuilding are as much if not more a focal point than the sailing skills of the team, and because this is the first iteration of this class, differences in design approach are going to produce one boat that is superior to the other, IF the AC72 class rule was locked in as is for the next 30years, as the older monohull rules were, we could see a coming together of design ideas and boats that are very similar in performance, but it would take two to three cycles of the cup to get there.
Those who are expecting a match-racing of two identical boats and last minute finish-line duels, are probably watching the wrong event, and the MRWT would be the better place to look for that.
The LV series is the closest you might get to seeing two similar design boats with close racing, the final event will likely be one boat totally dominating the other.

 

Well said Steve!

 

Yep, even tho I said the exact same things about 6 pages back... Doug still refuses to believe it tho!

 

The media obviously supports what weve said, this was from back on june 26th;

http://tvnz.co.nz/americas-cup-video/team-nz-fighting-america-s-rule-change-5477560

 

Groper,
We are not here to convince Doug to think the way we do, we are simply here to disagree with him.

 

The limitations of the experiment were pretty straight forward, they were the class rules of the C-class cats.

The only difference between the platforms was the beam of the hulls, 12' for FYH and 14' for Alpha. That only came into play in disp conditions where OYR had slightly reduced available RM. Keep in mind the boat still had racks on it to allow us to trap at full width, you lost a foot of RM due to the hull being inboard a bit to leeward. Pretty much all the other variables were controlled pretty carefully. Two boat testing was constant, including daily swapping of crews. Full analysis of GPS tracks, wind conditions etc every day after training, testing and racing. Sailing in straight lines 30 ft apart for miles and miles and miles, you begin to get an idea for how things are performing, even if it doesn't meet your high standards for peer review. (We are kind of keen on not having our peers review our work until after an event anyhow)

For us, racing is the control, because that is what it is designed for. And yes, we went through all manner of configurations of the systems and tried sailing them many different ways.

In some regards OYR was a great boat. If I had to go sail in a moderate to heavy air regatta today, I could imagine worse choices that that boat. We might well do a number of things differently in how we operate it but it was not a terrible boat by any means. she was just sticky by comparison. With a lot more practice as Rohan pointed out, we could likely have squeezed a lot more out of it at the end of the day, we simply ran out of time and had to make a choice about which boat to really put the final push on.

The hull shapes on that boat were just fine for what it did. It allowed it to get to take off speed pretty quickly. a more contemporary hull shape would not have helped it get there any quicker, quite the contrary. Once she was up on foils, her hull shape was pretty much not relevant, it could have been a flying pickle at that point.

Were I to do it again, we would choose different foil configurations with less wetted surface area as that was what ultimately kind of killed the concept. Even today, if we had the resources I would say we could or should add some foils to Canaan, if only to give it partial lift characteristics even without full flight, and it would, above 8 knots of breeze undoubtedly improve it's performance and make it a different boat to sail by miles and miles.

I have not followed Doug's whole line of thinking on this thread, nor yours to be fair so my comments may not be right on the point you were making but I will say this. The boats are vastly different with foils under them, in a good way, for us. Doug's numbers are a little thin on WS multiples for both disp and foil mode. In foil mode we have seen well over three times wind speed in some conditions. We have an excellent base line boat to work with in Canaan, and she cannot touch FYH in many conditions. Again, we do lots of on the water controls with swapping crews, recording everything, eliminating variables. you can cry and moan about it being a bad or "thin" paper because you are likely determined to do that but at the end of the day, for us, racing is the ultimate test, because that's what the boats are designed for. I can tell you that right now, in a race of certain conditions, there is no question which is the faster boat.

Doug may get a little over-exicted about foils and make some rather "big" claims about them. So be it. I can only speak to my experience having gone both ways and my personal experience is that foils are here to stay, above the cross-over point they make the boat far more enjoyable to sail, safer, faster and in some ways more managable. To be sure, they add cost and complexity and there is still a lot to work out to make them more user friendly but you would be nuts to not seriously consider them in any moderately high performance multihull today.