I pity the poor students then if this is the standard of tripe you trot out as engineering gospel. I'll be sure to advise my engineering student daughter not to consider the land of the clog in her options for a semester transfer. The crafty old b**tard with 30 years sailing and building experience has some very interesting discussions on these things wth the bright young theory bound student!

Timbo is on to it. He now understands most of the sailing world prefers stiffer platforms and has moved on to consider some ways to achieve them.

Klaus - I like your explanation about beams. I think in isolation a round beam is strongest in all directions but then you have to consider the direction of the greatest forces. I think that is vertical. In A's some have approached that issue by firstly making the beam a larger diameter for overall mechanical advantage then having thicker walls top and bottom. This is easy to do with carbon by filament winding. In alloy of course the dolphin striker does the job. In bigger cats the pelikan striker does the same for forebeams subject to forestay load. I disagree on the amount of energy lost though when the platform twists and returns. Unlike the watch spring that return energy isn't applied to the original job - that is forward motion. I think a substantial amount of it is lost by the platform "wriggling" about in the water rather than applying it to smooth forward motion. I certainly agree with you that there are many other very productive ways to improve speed - probably the most significant for most of us being operaor skill. However the topic of this thread was the merit of varying levels of boat stiffness. I believe a good sailor on a stiffer platform will always beat an equally good sailor on a less stiff platform.

I'm over this now - off to sail on my glued carbon beamed rocketship. Mmmmm - wonder how I can make it stiffer!

Cheers