Wave-piercers - marketing myth or design ingenuity?

Wow. I was on the wrong boat. I thought this was a discussion about the current state of the art in the technology of high speed marine vessels and where and how the Wave Piercers fit in to that mix. Actual experience, practice and application. It went 'existential' from there.

Fortunately for my business, many high speed vessels respond quite favorably to the addition of active control systems..and they always will.

I see on your web site nothing that would ever use active stablization anyway..nor carry 500 pax and cars across the English Channel at 42 knots in SS5. So its doubtfull that my collection of 'techno gadgets' would ever be of the slightest interest to you..and quite understandably so. The 63m fast missile craft we are currently fitting up...whole nuther story.

 

"Look around your own life and witness just how much of it you have given over to the fabulous new ideas that were ginned-up by marketing divisions in some corporate beehive. These company boys have long ago drunk the Kool-Aid and now they want you to drink it as well.
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'Off topic' does not begin to describe that rant. The development of active vessel stabilization was 100% 'need driven' and the products entirely a response to a need. Nobody thunk it up and foisted it on anyone..owners, operators and designers of high-speed vessels demanded solutions and eventually they were forthcoming. The active control solutions have continued to evolve and become more widely applied on the basis of need and performance alone. Heck, we've never even paid for so much as one lousy magazine ad in the last decade. Those who need what we build..they know where to find us and find us they do too.

 

So you do in fact agree with me.

And I do agree with you, that active controls are the way to go if one really wants stability.

 

I tend to shy away from using the word 'stability' too loosely..even though our systems are referred to as stabilization systems. Stability encompasses an awful lot in the way of naval architecture.

On a hydrofoil and even 'pure'* SWATHs..we provide stability in almost the ultimate NA sense of the word. On a hard-chine planing mono hull we provide 'stability' only to the extent that we can reduce the amplitude of transient pitch and roll 'excursions'. On displacement cats, slender monohulls and tris..we accomplish motion and stability improvements that are 'in between'. On surface efect ships (SES) we stabilize the air cushion, damping the fundamental and higher-order acoustic resonances in the air chamber but otherwise affect the overall 'stability' of the craft not a wit.

* By 'pure' SWATHs I mean those that have not been morphed in a hydrostatic sense more toward cats..SWATHs that are true to Creed's original intent to totally decouple the hull from surface waves. Higdon SWATH's, for example..designed from the git-go to rely on an active stabilization system to achieve the amazing things that they do in rough seas. Considering that the more superlative SWATH and hydrofoil designs and their reliance on active control to function at all goes back to the 70s..it kinda brings in to question the whole 'techno gadget' characterization of such design approaches..doesn't it? Last I checked..the 70s were 40 years + back..

 

B-Mac,

It's only, as you say... existential, if you choose to limit yourself to your current paradigm.

Suggesting that any of this has been off-topic, demands that one show that what they are contributing is, in fact, On-Topic. Since the thread title is about, Wave-piercers - marketing myth or design ingenuity?, I suggest that what I have contributed is as relevant as is your component. You want to say that active systems are relevant to the design of wave piercing hulls. My response has been to point out that excessive gadgetry in the pursuit of solution is a process of casting the owner of the boat in a role of near complete dependence upon the system in question. That is a problem that is endemic to our Western society and it is taking us in a very wrong direction. My opinion, of course, much as are those espoused by yourself.

For the record... what you are doing is interesting to me, but only up to a point. The reason is that within a very short time, there will be other, more snazzy systems and what is seen today will become passe. Good hull design, on the other hand, has a timeless quality to it with relevance far into the future. If that comment weren't so, then what makes trad and classic boat designs so compelling to many of the members of this forum? Do you suppose that any of those guys have a then, state of the art, B&W green screen CRT TV in their salon?

"The development of active vessel stabilization was 100% 'need driven' and the products entirely a response to a need. Nobody thunk it up and foisted it on anyone..owners, operators and designers of high-speed vessels demanded solutions and eventually they were forthcoming. The active control solutions have continued to evolve and become more widely applied on the basis of need and performance alone."

You'll have to pardon me if I have to chuckle just a bit after reading this quoted passage. It sounds so mysteriously like something that was recently said by the executives of Toyota when talking about their throttle and engine management systems. "... the customers demanded this and we delivered."

B-Mac... all marketing efforts will say the very same thing as you do in the quote above. Nobody but an egotist would choose to attribute excessively complex system developments within an industry to their raging and unbridled brainstorms on bar room napkins.

Now, if you want to get this all back to the topic of wave piercing hulls and the design of same, then by all means, offer-up your take on the topic. There are plenty of wave piercing designs out there that do not need active systems to make them work properly. If it's pitch and roll control systems that you wish to address, then perhaps a new thread about same would be the most appropriate at this point?

 

Nice try. But since the inventor of the wave piercer himself told me that active stabilization 'saved' the concept..I'll suggest that discussion of same is certainly relevant to the thread. Directly so.

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If you read what I posted earlier, you would have seen that we leveraged existing SWATH and hydrofoil control solutions to solve the suddenly urgent need to tame the 'then-new' wave piercing cats. Pretty simple concept really..and the rest, as they say, is now history. If you want to assert that we were not responding to needs alone..find any marketing mateial..any at all..anywhere..and post it here. Opinions are one thing..unsubstantiated assertions quite another.

You betcha. As more and more designers come to us, and with more and varied hull configurations, we are constantly working to evolve our system designs. We've always been pushed pretty hard in that respect, as a rule, but it keeps the business interesting and growing. No small part of that constant development is also focused on increasing realiability and decreasing life-cycle cost.