Many of you will have seen this video of Oracle's AC 45 spectacularly cartwheeling across the "natural amphitheater".
If they are having these kind of challenges with the AC45s, what's it going to be like when the AC72s are racing on San Francisco Bay?
From what I hear, there are a number of significant challenges with the AC72. I saw the celebrated yacht designer, Juan Kouyoumdjian make a presentation a few months back. Candidly I found it very hard hard to follow, as his presentation seemed more geared towards people with advanced degrees in naval architecture. He said a few things about the AC72s that really got my attention (or at least I understood).
He was asked about the design challenges of building an AC72. He smiled wryly and said that he was still trying to figure it out how to design an AC72. He was only half-joking. He was clearly wrestling with some significant issues.
The logistics alone of handling the wing sail are mind-boggling. The huge wing sail will need to be stepped and unstepped before every race. It's easy to imagine a day when the winds are light early in the morning but up in the high teens after the race. The beast of a sail will be a nightmare to unstep. It will be bloody dangerous.
Did I ever mention before that I wish they’d still be sailing 12 meters? No cartwheels and you can leave the masts up overnight.
I think what they haven’t figured out yet is that, to keep the boats from capsizing, they will need to add some sort of weight under the boat to act as, well, a kind of counterbalance thing.
They could make this from any number of materials, but probably a very dense metal would be best.
If it were fashioned in the form of a narrow but deep sort of fin, it could add the required weight but still pass through the water efficiently.
I know this is kind of a whacky idea, but in the world of high-tech racing machines, they need to be thinking outside the box.
That’s a very good idea. They may also consider bring the ammas together, even creating a single hull, er, wait…
What’s the big deal? Lasers capsize all the time.