how come no multihull toy RC sail boats?

Reason I'm interested in multihull RC sail boat has to do with the way all the mono-hull RC boats have exaggerated long skinny keels ending in bulb.

I'd like to be able to launch, sail and recover a sailing RC boat in shallow ponds and without needing to get muddy and wet past my knees.

While cat and tri boats wont sail upwind as well as a mono, it occurs to me that an RC could be designed to do so reasonably well, since no need for big bridge deck.

Yeah, I get it that the mainstream of RC sailboats is about a racing class where groups meetup at certain ideal locations. But I'm thinking an ultra shallow RC boat would allow use in all sorts of new areas.

 

Well, there you go.
Stayed or unstayed?

 

Some wiseacre will have the answer, but I'm tipping it has to do with stability and scaling, and that at small scale a sail cat will tip over too easily.

 

I think you're on the money, Mr E. And it would then be a long wait at the side of the lake.

 

Check out the Mini40 class. I think recent ones are mostly foilers, but there are also plenty of conventional cats & tris.

 

There's a ready to run r/c cat called the Joysway Binary, only 16" long. You could also saw off half the fin of a typical mono and fit a slightly heavier ballast.

 

check eg here Foiling radio control trimarans https://www.boatdesign.net/threads/foiling-radio-control-trimarans.55840/
and anything by Ian Holt

RW

 

....and there is the Thunder Tiger Volans tri, 39" long.

 

that Joysway looks about right. Its got pretty deep daggerboards, but I'm sure those could be shortened with some loss of performance but no real risk.

 

impressive. I'd have guessed viscosity of water VS surface area VS volume would've prevented such a small sailing hydrofoil.

 

Tipping moment scales as the third power of relative size. Righting moment scales as the fourth power. So very small sailboats have minuscule stability compared to the exact same form scaled up.
Wetted surface vs sail area is a fixed relationship. Viscous drag close to the ground limits wind speed for tiny vessels, and good thing or they'd blow away. With the unfavorable scaling relationship, however, it is difficult to get enough lift, at
L=cl*d*v² to overcome wetted surface area drag.

 

Your instincts are basically right. Models operate at much smaller Reynolds numbers than we're used to dealing with, and that can cause problems, especially for the very small & slow ones.

Once the foilers take off and speed up though, it becomes less of a problem for them.

 

Here's the Ripmax Joysway Binary. I was rather liking one myself. But the end of the video shows the problem

 

Pitchpole!

 

At that scale, all the moments of inertia are completely out of proportion with mass, wetted surface drag, and airfoil forces.