Sailboat Design and Operation and Improvements to

Don't pound the tinnies!
tinnie - Wiktionary https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tinnie

 

While we are on the subject of risks, there is this: Boat Circling with No-One Onboard

Not wearing life vest?

 

In hydrofoil paddle boarding, using a handheld kite sail is becoming more popular. I'm looking at trying to just kick a boom higher on the back end, and a multitude of problems come into Play, including needing to put additional seems in the sail. It suddenly becomes twice as expensive for boom and main sail costs for me to want an adjustable back end boom. I basically also have to design a modified furling system for the boom and build it myself. A aero propulsion team has built a kite sail that goes incredibly fast, but you can only use it for a uni directional tack, functionally. It then requires them to modify the ship to handle those high speeds, which means very low speed if they aren't using the kite. And the ship isn't setup with a mast and the mast holding lines might get in the way if it did exist. Seems like a kite could work for downwind, but if there is no purposeful drag, they kite will fall as it pulls the ship

 

It doesn't really matter. Just do what interests you. The thing to remember is the sailing boat has been heavily optimised over centuries. You aren't going to find a better way to make a wheel because pretty much everything has been tried, and concepts that were abandoned were abandoned for good reason. Developments usually come from new technology. What you can do is to build a conventional wheel that's optimised for your particular cart and provided you want to take that journey and throw out a lot of failures en route it can be a worthwhile exercise.
However if you just want to go sailing keep with the conventional.

 

my modest recommendation:
do a TON of reading
do some sailing

& then come back with carefully worded questions that do not imply ANY "opinion" why "something is/isn't done this or another way"....
it will do your reputation here a lot of good!

 

always fascinating, that the rank beginners ruminate about how to improve the wheel...

 

It's often just another way of asking a question and learning - wondering why it isn't done *this* way...

 

When you ask "why not do it "X" way" you are arguably creating a closed question, and therefore limiting the answers you get and as a result the knowledge you can learn. If one asked "why not build a submarine out of cardboard" you may get answers about the structural limitations of cardboard along with information about crush depth etc, but all the information about cardboard's structural limitations represents a waste of time to the people giving you the information, and a waste of time when you could be learning more about sub design.

And in reality, the person who says "why not build a sub out of cardboard" is normally going to seem like a smart-*** who thinks he can come up with better ideas than the people who spend their lives learning about sub design, and that creates understandable resistance.

When we're carrying out investigations, we are trained to start with open questions; "how do they build submarines" is much more open than "why not build a cardboard sub", where you are inherently restricting the question and the answer and therefore limiting the information you will receive.

In something of a similar vein, the other night I was reading a book about the early development of Operations Research. Often OR is presented as a case of brilliant boffins being presented with a situation and coming up with an idea that confounded the 'experts'. Pat Blackett, often said to the leading figure in early OR, is quoted as saying that most of the time when the scientists were presented with a situation, in reality they found out that the 'experts' were actually experts and were doing it right. It's just that we are only told about the minority of cases where the outsider was right and the experts were wrong.

I know that in my hobby as a researcher in the history of sailboat design, I've found out that many historical artifacts that are presented as evidence of conservatism or idiocy are actually, if you dig deep enough, perfectly intelligent responses to the issues of the day.

 

Thanks for your reply, CT. 'How we learn' is a really important area, and you've raised a lot of interesting points. I'm short of time just now, and conscious of veering well off topic, so I'll try to find time to start a new thread, and respond more fully. Cheers.