Need Help Using DELFTship free!

I have relatively little experience with CAD programs, and I just downloaded DELFTship free. Could someone please walk me through the steps of designing a fairly simple boat on DELFTship? I have tried experimenting with all of the different tools and so far all I can do is create a box and create points. I don't know how to create any curves or angles yet. Any help is greatly appreciated. EDIT: Any experience I do have with CAD programs is with AutoCAD 2007, which is completely different from what I can tell.

Thanks for your help

 

How much do you know about boat design in general? Do you think you could design a boat with a pencil, paper, triangles, curves, splines and weights?

 

Read the manuals and look at the tutorials.

IMO, it can take a couple of weeks to really get going with Delftship if you
are starting from scratch.

 

DCockey, I know a fair amount about boat design, but I am by no means an expert. I could design a boat on paper, but I don't have the proper drafting tools. I do know the different hull types, (planing, semi displacement, full displacement) building materials, and nautical terms (LWL, LOA, draft, beam, gunwale, strake, chine, rocker, sternpost, deadrise, tumblehome, displacement, etc.) The boat I am trying to design is LOA 32', 7' beam, and 4.5' hull depth. The hull is semi displacement non planing and it will use an inboard diesel of about 15-20 hp.

 

Have you tried File/New and inputting the various fields? That will give you a starter hull which you can refine as you go. To put a transom on it, select the edge of the hull at the transom and extrude the edge in a negative direction to the center line (go past it and return all the y values to 0 for each of the points).

 

Speaking of DELFTship free, it is a crippled version. For example, you can't save developed plates, and there are a number of other features that have been removed as well, such as some of the import/export features.

Free!ship plus is another free program. It is very similar to DELFTship free. (They had the same origin, and then they diverged from each other.) Free!ship plus has no disabled features. Unfortunately, the file format is not compatible between Free!ship plus and DELFTship free, so you can't transfer files between the two programs.

It seems to me that there are only two reasons to use DELFTship free. 1) You never plan to actually do something with (i.e. "use") a design developed with DELFTship free, or 2) you plan to eventually upgrade to the non-free version of DELFTship.

Having finished that rant, once you create the points, have you figured out how to move them around?