Hi Carl,
My point is that if you don't know what you are doing, you don't know what you've got.
Adrenalin is an example of a boat that was built to an exciting idea, pivoting amas, with incomplete analysis and understanding. Pivoting amas should move through the water with less drag than fixed amas. Less drag means more speed. What a great idea. Evidently no forward stability calculations were done. This proved to be the boat's downfall. The boat originally had a 76ft tall mast on it. A few downwind runs/reaches and the mast was shortened to 56ft. Why??? When the amas pivot as forward pitching moment increases, they provide no increase in pitchpole resistance. The boat wanted to dive all the time. This design was very deficient in pitchpole resistance due to the "pivoting" amas. A few minutes of forward stability calculations would have said, "hey, wait a minute; we have a problem".
Sailing World magazine said this boat was a "world beater, a breakthrough design for trimarans". The last thing I heard about the boat was that it sits abandoned in an old boatyard with weeds growing up around it several feet tall.
A few minutes of calculations and analysis could have made a big difference here in time and effort and dollars spent.
Bill