Nobody is saying that, it is a retorical trick that is played by the side who favours eternal chaos in the F16 class. By the way, I'm not saying that you are part of that side, Darren.

What is said is that increasingly improving platform stiffness is a project of diminishing returns. At one time a point is reached beyond which additional stiffness is not worth the investments.

Compare it to double glassing in your home. A single layer of glass lets out a sizeable amount of heat from your living quarters. Getting double glazing cuts this loss in half. An errrornous but understandable reaction to this gain could be to get 10-double glassing. Afterall, each time the loss is cut by half, right, so more is "always" better !

Yet, we hardly see any triple glassing in the real world and anything beyond that is unheard off. The reason for this is simple. Triple glassing will only cut in half of what was left after cutting it in half the first time. So if the first time the energy savings amounted to a reduction from say 100 to 50 bucks then the second time the reduction only amouted to a savings of 25 bucks. The fourth and fifth times would result only in respectively 12.5 bucks and 6.25 bucks.

Obviously a reduction of 50 points is easily noticed but a reduction of 12.5 points much less so. Afterall it is only 25% of the the first reduction and 1/8th of the total costs initially incurred with single glassing.

Say the first F16's flexed 64 mm when layed up on their sterns with one hull lifted (note that the standard Hobie Tiger and Nacra F18 flexed in this test by 92 mm !). In fact, my homebuild Taipan F16 (small beams) flexes by about that amount. The first Blade (small 80x2 beams) flexed 40 mm and the newer Blades flexed by about 30 mm. The Falcon with newly designed custom beams is stiffer still and the Stealth always flexed in the order of 20-25 mm (was a very stiff boat from the beginning). Lets say the Viper flexes by about half that amount say 10 mm (on a par with the very best all-carbon A-cats and way better then the modern F18's).

Say my own boat losses 60 seconds per hour bouy racing relative to the Viper due to platform flexing alone. This is a huge amount in my opinion but lets assume a large difference for arguments sake. Note how the Viper is over 6 times stiffer then my own homebuild. Using these numbers we can calculate the relative differences between different F16 makes.


Relative differences (rounded off)

30 seconds / hour gain : Taipan F16 to prototype Blade F16 (80x2 beams)
10 seconds / hour gain : Prototype Blade to Alter cup Blade
5 seconds / hour gain : Alter Blade to Stealth or Falcon :
15 seconds/ hour gain : Stealth/Falcon to Viper :

Absolute differences (rounded off)

30 seconds / hour gain : Taipan F16 to prototype Blade F16 (80x2 beams)
40 seconds / hour gain : Taipan F16 to Alter cup Blade
45 seonds / hour gain : Taipan F16 to Stealth or Falcon
60 seconds/ hour gain : Taipan F16 to Viper F16


So obviously, this example does not disproof that in the F16 situation more platform stiffness makes a boat faster. That is NOT the point. The point is that a gain of 15 seconds between the new generation F16's and the Viper F16 is not much at all. Certainly not when running the numbers on loss of performance by putting 23 kg additional weight on the platform (and get to such a high level of stiffness). Who is not to say that that alone losses 10 seconds of the 15 seconds stiffness gain already, leaving only a negligiable difference of only 5 seconds ! Note that Texel handicap system assumes a 4.752 second performance loss per hour bouy racing per SINGLE kg of added weight; resulting in over 72 seconds per hour (2 points) over 22 kg. So anyone may run the numbers of the example above for any number of minutes the difference is between my home build Taipan F16 and the professionally build Viper F16. The end result will be discouraging every single time.

Therefore many of us here argue that platform stiffness on F16's has already progressed so far that the performance differences are too small to matter. The base line stiffness set by the Stealth, Falcon, Aussie Blade and most likely the AquaRaptor as well is already at such a level such that there is simply not enough performance loss due to flexing left to make a big difference.

The very same reason why no-one is ordering quadriple glassing for his home.

Wouter