Maltese Falcon ... hit or miss?

[brian eiland]

Wingsail Rigs

Not really understanding how this wingsail discussion(s) ended up in the Maltese Falcon subject thread

...perhaps here:
http://www.boatdesign.net/forums/boat-design/design-soft-wing-sails-cruising-49425.html (very interesting discussions)

or here:
http://www.boatdesign.net/forums/sailboats/wing-drive-6698.html

 

[CT249]

Surely wing masts will "work" on more or less any boat. Work as in stand up and hold sails up. Like any other style of equipment they bring a range of features and characteristics which will have advantages and disadvantages in different cicrumstances.

In dinghies for instance they bring to the party quite different bend characteristics which have some advantages and also some pretty big disadvantages. Aerodynamic benefits seem to be fairly marginal in most situations. Its interesting that they've only really stuck on the NS14 which is an extreme case with unusually slippery hulls and smallish sails. If I built a wing mast and put it on my IC next season it will work all right, as in the boat will have much the same sort of speed as it does now with a fairly conventional pole mast.

On the other hand I remember Alex Vallings saying to me that the trouble with developing new ideas is that if you are competing with standard kit developed to say 95% of potential then either you need to get your new concept to a pretty high percentage of potential first time out or else it needs to be a really big advance. And even then there's the problem of working out whether Bill won because of his boat speed or in spite of his lack of it.

All of that's true, of course, but IMHO in the end the issue is that for many "conventional" craft, wingmasts do not seem to be any better and may be worse, therefore the fact that most sailors do not use them is not because of conservatism but for good reasons. It would seem that the issue is that wingmasts only work better with flat sails and small headsails or una rigs, or in oceanic conditions where you're reaching in steady winds a lot.

It's interesting to see that even the "supermaxi" guys - who include one of the world's best multihull design teams, someone else who became notorious for trying to use wing masts in IMS, and another group who try every new foil and are willing to slice up a champion 100 footer - have rejected wingmasts. Obviously VPLP, Juan K et al are not ignorant or conservative.

 

[CT249]

Not really understanding how this wingsail discussion(s) ended up in the Maltese Falcon subject thread

It came about as a result of your post headed

"Dynarig, a form of a Wingsail?" which included a link to an article that (among other factually incorrect claims) accused sailors of being too conservative to accept wingsails.

If such claims are going to be made, surely we can discuss them.

 

[brian eiland]

It came about as a result of your post headed

"Dynarig, a form of a Wingsail?" .

You're correct, I'm guilty.
My memory is really slipping.

 

[Squidly-Diddly]

Radar mast is awful, they should have spent whatever it took to put the radars on top of the main masts. Or at least cooked up a jib to cover the radars, even if the jib not really needed. Just so it can have a "good side" for pics, with jib in front of radars.

Wouldn't the radar see further WAY up high, and how much radar does a boat need these days with GPS, radios, weather reports, etc? I'd put a full crow's nest up there, with search lights, optics, etc, just because nothing beat a real life "view".

Warship style hill amid ships doesn't look right on a sail boat, and even less so on a square rigger. Since it basically a party boat, I'd have moved the structure aft to look right, with big central party deck midships, and small fore structure for crew, bathrooms away from main party deck, etc.

Whole thing smacks of something that might come out of Communist Bloc, where stuff gets ordered and everyone is afraid to question things.


But the whole DynaRig automated sails thing is real life Sci Fi and so far it seems to be working.

 

[brian eiland]

Tom Perkins has died

11 June 2016 by Caroline White

Tom Perkins, the venture capitalist and boundary-pushing superyacht owner, has died in California aged 84.

Perkins co-founded Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in the early 1970s, before venture capitalism was an established practice. He also helped to launch the computer division of Hewlett-Packard and invested heavily in the nascent Silicon Valley, making him a founding father of the digital age. Perkins was equally innovative in his yachting endeavours and is best known in nautical circles for his avant-garde three-master, Maltese Falcon.

http://www.boatinternational.com/yachts/news/in-memory-of-tom-perkins-1932-2016--30619

 

[brian eiland]

Black Pearl

 

[brian eiland]

Model Testing on YouTube

Recently there has been some interesting model testing with DynaRigs on Proas at YouTube videos:

Only the first of these referenced videos would play now. Does anyone know if, and how, one might access them??

 

[brian eiland]

Just found myself reading back thru this rather long (and very interesting) subject thread. I thought others might also find it interesting, so I reposted this reference to his book. Enjoy doing this very cold weather we are experiencing .

New Book on Tom Perkin's quest to build Maltese Falcon

On July 3 David A. Kaplan's new book, "Mine's Bigger": 'Tom Perkins and the Making of the Greatest Sailing Machine Ever Built' was due to be released.

"Tom Perkins had a dream. It wasn’t to get rich, acquire power, or marry fame. As the man most responsible for creating Silicon Valley, he had done all that. His venture-capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers remains the most celebrated money machine since the Medicis. He’d helped found Genentech and fund Google. And in 2006, his resignation from the Hewlett-Packard board of directors triggered the revelation of a spying scandal that dominated the front pages. Along the way, he also managed to get himself convicted of manslaughter in France and to become Danielle Steel’s Ex-Husband No. 5.

No, as hit his 70s, Perkins wanted to create the biggest, fastest, riskiest, highest-tech, most self-indulgent sailboat ever–the “perfect yacht.” His fantasy would be a modern clipper ship–as long as a football field, 42 feet wide, with three masts each rising 20 stories toward the heavens. This $130 million square-rigger–the Maltese Falcon–would evoke the era of magnificent vessels that raced across the oceans in the 19th century.

With keen storytelling and biting wit, Newsweek’s David A. Kaplan takes us behind the scenes of an extraordinary project and inside the mind of a larger-than-life character. We discover why any sane man would gamble a sizeable chunk of his net worth on a boat. We meet the cast of engineers who conspired with him. And we learn about the other two monumental yachts just built by gazillionaires that Perkins is ever eyeing. In a battle of egos on the high seas, Perkins loves to preen, “Mine’s better! Mine’s bigger!” On the Falcon’s climactic voyage across the Mediterranean–1,600 nautical miles from Istanbul through the Dardanelles, to the Greek Islands and Malta, by Sicily and Sardinia, and on to the French Riviera–we revel with Perkins as his creation surges along at record-breaking speeds.

This is the biography of a remarkable boat and the man who built it. More than a tale of technology, Mine’s Bigger is a profile of ambition, hubris and the imagination of a legendary entrepreneur. And in the end, too, it is a story of love and loss.".....Kaplan

Buy the book, see more photos, watch a video...at Kaplan's website:
http://www.davidakaplan.com/

a very interesting excerpt from that book on posting #115
Excerpt from Mine's Bigger: Tom Perkins and the Making of the Greatest Sailing Machine Ever Built by David A. Kaplan (HarperCollins 2007).