Two hulls with a mast sprouting from each hull, 60'lg. When it comes to multihulls you have to admire the French.

The Extraterrestrial's new boat with twin masts here at Yves Parlier's website.
1. http://www.parlier.org

2. Near the top of the page click on "Le Bateau".
3. Then, on the drop down menu cliquez ici: "Les Characteristiques".
4. You can then click on the three thumbnails on that page for full screen renderings of le bateau du E.T.

There are also some great shots of the vacuum bagging during construction. Makes me wish I had a BIG garage and bags and bags of Euros to spend.

I wonder how long it will take to get that in a beachcat-sized package?

How about 1985? 28 knots.

That looks like fun.

Where do I place my order?

Is one wing on two hulls also OK. ?

Speedsail

Those are foils on the hulls under the Tornado sails. That's how they got the 28 knots.

On the other photo, the one with the wild wing, it makes me wonder how they can keep the boat hullborne as it definitely looks like it has the capability to come above the water.

With the 'tom's speedsail', it looks as though we could finally
'fly a hull' -both of them!

'Check the Flaps'!!-Check
We have ignition.........

Also, pretty cool how they stay the outboard side of the masts on the twin rig design, by staying the inboard side and using a static connection near the top of the mast for the windward side of the windward-most mast.

How about this one ?

I think that this one will be faster... if it is ever built



The Architect is Nic Bailey from UK

http://www.btinternet.com/~nic.bailey/

The cat was design for The Race but was never built

After Kingfisher lost their mast yesterday, I think the designers and sailors will be taking another look at designs like that.

It sure looks like a reaching machine doesn't it?

Remember Team Phillips????? That boat had huge problems with their twin mast setup and the loads it placed on the hulls. They had to rebuild the bearings on both sides of the boat. --- before it broke up!

Designers-dream, engineers-figure, builders-toil and sailors will break it. Thats the joy of boating.

S

yeah - but they were pushing the fine edge by trying a boat with unstayed masts.

There are a few example of sucessfull boats with unstayed mast

The more common example is the Laser 1

Another example is the wite wings the 36' trimaran by Dick Newick
http://www.wingo.com/newick/



Finally, the Nonsuch boat
http://www.nonsuch.org


Let me ask you a question, if you board an airplane, would you feel more secure if the wings were held in place with steel wires...

I feel that the unstayed mast are the thing to come on recreationnal boats. It will be much more difficult to install an unstayed mast on a beach catamaran and the extra reinforcements will likely weight more but it could be possible as well.

The Team Philips experience was a disaster. The designer went against the trend of all the other race boat and they had little support in the communauty. Team Philips bashing became common. Also, their boat lack testing and ajustement. The concept worked for a while but the boat was lost.

It would have been really interesting to see Team Philips in the first part of the race. My feeling is that in medium wind, it could have been faster than the other more conventionnal boats. In the 40th parallele, the situation could have been reversed because I think that the Team Philips boat would have been handicap in bigger waves

That is my opinion

I will quote Bill Roberts on Team Philips:
"The best project for the Race"


There was no problem with the project itself - apparently, the carbon construction was improperly executed and the required strength was not achieved.

The boat is good, but was not constructed correctly. Maybe Multiplast could give it a try.

Cheers,

Luiz

The team Philips was my favorite boat for the Race. Unfortunatly, it wasn't ready and it wasn't sailed safely on it's sea trial so the boat was lost.

I think that they relied too much on numeric optimizaton of the structure and finite element design and that the boat was too light in many area.

I do not think that Multiplast would have been able to get it right because most problems were caused by some design flaws by the architect or by the design team. I do not know if Multiplast would have refused some plans and taken the responsability of changing the desigh. However, the reputation of Multiplast in term on high performance raicing multihull should have been enough to get the designers to change their caiculations

It happens when you design a boat out of high modulus carbon fiber. It lack the dampening effect of a softer construction and you can get into problems and faillure on certain structures. My opinion is that it is what happened on this design. The unstayed mast had alot of movement in the headaccording to the small video clips and every occillation was amplified at the base. A softer mast with a lower modulus would have been better and would have put less stress on the mast base.

I am starting to work on the plans of my first cruising catamaran and I will try to have an unstayed mast on it. I am confident that it will do better than the Team Philips (well, maybe not in speed )

Wow ,-beautifull design .

On larger cat designs the proportion of sail area to hull L and ratio of mast height is so much less comparitively that this configuration works well .

Researched into duel rigs by conducting a patent search ,-years ago ..
There are duel rigs on the old square rigger sailing ships in the 1800s shown on patents of the time with particular" les innovations "
There was an excellent book on -Curios Yachting Inventions ,-
most comical but you realize the intent and see progression from the concepts and how they influence and evolve .
It would make a great similar book now based on multihull design innovation ,-but add the connections in design to present day design reality .
There is really not much new conceptually ,-just a great refinement process of engineering materials and the attempt to refine the concept into working reality . It would be fasinating to document these early ideas and present day design corelations .

Sailing ,--its so much fun in so many different aspects of the sport ,-inc.design innovation .
It is very difficult to understand the concept of timed handicaping our cat racing here in N A .
iT IS COMPLETELY CONTRARY to {les innovations } and the progression and development of sailing craft design which multihulls are on the leading edge of .



Carl

I though TP was abandoned due to rudder problems with no back up system. (it's hard to imagine they would design it without a backup system for steerage)

And the center pod came loose!!

Yes they were out on the sea trials and the centre pod was smacked from underneath by some large waves causing the steering to damage/fail so they couldn't really do much.

I read somewhere that they had reached a top speed of 38 knots and the boat felt really strong once the port bow had been stitched back on.

Also, the other problem with the design was that the safety pod was in the middle of the vessel and above the hulls. In a capsize the safety pod would be underwater.

I am currently reading "Sail Performance" by C. A. Marchaj, and he talks about the crab claw sail being the most efficient sail. This sail configuration also uses two masts.

I also found a site which summarises Marchaj's findings and has a picture of a catamaran with this sail config.

http://www.schachtdesign.com/proafile/volume_3/options_crab_claw.html

it makes interesting reading