V Twin

Well the design is set in stone, so it must be right.

Originally posted by Contender 541 Good luck to you Graham   Many think Fewer contemplate Occasionally one or two do   It works or it does not - well done that man for getting this far

+1

Some more pictures on the blog, the decks laminated, the bits go together next week and it's time to sort the rig and topside stuff out.

Originally posted by rich96 Lots of interesting ideas.   1)Why two kites  & poles ?   2)How will you get any luff tension in an inflatable jib ?   3)How long is the hull ? - It looks a quite short ?   4) It also looks like it may 'squat'/stick a bit in light winds ?   Well done for actually building it though - good luck.

This sort of reminds me of something I was reading a while back: "The Athenian trireme": the story of how a recreation of a 5th Century BC warship was made. The thing is they don't have that much data, so a lot of the design had to be done from scratch. And when it came to hull shape the dimensions - length to beam ratio and prismatic coefficient (how fat the ends are compared to the middle) - were so far from anything used today that all the available formulae, computer models and the like were essentially useless so they just had to take a guess and hope.

In the same way what you are up to here is so outside the normal range that its going to be very difficult to predict what it will do. How many variations do you reckon you'll be able to try? It would, after all, be extraordinary if something so radical could be right first time. Smart money is you'll need a couple of iterations. Its what I should have done with my rather less radical PlusPlus project: built another prototype or two, but the trouble was I'd kinda lost interest after a while... In an ideal world I'd have had a team of development sailors sailing it every day all summer I suppose.