RS500 ...

Originally posted by furtive If anyone's interested, there's another pic of the 500 ...

Very strong touch of Bethwaite about the chineline - it looks to me as if there's the same slight inversion of the chine line aft I see on the 29er and 49er.

Originally posted by 49erGBR735HSC No matter how much weight the 5000 can lose, she can never come close to a 49er (I hope you were making a sarcastic comment yellowhammer!!!!).

Just trying to remedy the Mogadon

Originally posted by Stefan Lloyd Really though, I wonder if any boats are being mass-produced, in the way a mainstream consumer-products manufacturer would use the term. JimC's post on another thread brings home what a tiny market there actually is for dinghies.

and your average 1.8LX is cheep to make in numbers, but you wouldn't want to race one long term, even if everyone else on the circuit was restricted to unmodified "SMOD 1.8s"

The 5-tonner was and won't be an awful boat, pretty cracking from my point of veiw. Mind you the 49er takes saling to another level. No matter how much weight the 5000 can lose, she can never come close to a 49er (I hope you were making a sarcastic comment yellowhammer!!!!).

Edited by 49erGBR735HSC

Originally posted by yellowhammer Originally posted by CurlyBen Apparently no new Laser 2s have been made recently, which leaves the Laser, 4000 and Dart 18. All good boats but no twin wired ultra high performance boats and I'm sure they're shifting a lot more 'training' boats than they are of the higher performance boats they make. Back to market forces then... Sorry, I didn't mean that RS should have made the 500 a performance boat. What I mean is that the potential performance of a design isn't realised when you pile on weight. I think this leads to an early demise of SMOD classes, which is another good business ploy for the SMOD builders, intentional or not, and one in the eye for buyers. Bethwaite says when he was developing his L2 prototypes they kept pace with the best Tasar sailors, but when production L2s met up with Tasars at a pre-worlds event a few years later, the L2s were a lap down at the finish. It was dumbed down to mediocrity. Imagine the impact the 5-tonner might have had if it had lost some pounds at birth ... years ahead of the 49er!

Precisely the point I was making the post before yours. You have to mass
produce for volume with unskilled labour to make any profit. L5000 a
good case in point. Make it with the right materials and it would be great
boat but it would be dam expensive. And the market isn't there when you
figure in the price point it would of been.

Seems a simple business equation to me. Faster boats = more advanced
building materials = more costs, labour and stock = harder to sail = less
people = high price point = less sales = don't make.

Mass production needs volume. Currently you can't make high
performance boats in a true volume manner. Hence far more Rotomould
boats being built as well as spray in chop strand glass boats being kept in
the portfolio.

Especially as RS have cornered any performance segment at the moment.
They arrived if you remember when Topper and Laser were producing
quite bad examples of high performance boats which caused them both a
lot of difficulties. There just isn't much room left for many more volume
performance boats without aggressively targeting an existing SMOD or
OD to achieve heavy brand switch. And this is a risky business plan. Far
better to expand into lower performance areas and potentially grow the
market base and loyalty. And if the base expands and filters upward you
have more opportunities in the future for higher performance boats.
That's what I think anyway.