My dear friends Lorsail, Morales et al!
OK, now I fully understand your point. Is SEB a Bruce Farr design? If any designer should know about crush zones and energy absorbing materials it must be Bruce. I believe he was involved in a car crash several years ago. A rather bad crash. Fortunatelly, he recovered very well. If it works on big boats, why not on rc?
Regards,
Booster
Could an airbag help?
Wis
if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it!
My dear friends lorsail, Wis et al!
Well, regarding Bruce I don’t know if he was lucky enough to have a car with airbag. For sure he is worth it! In cars there is a accelration/pulse sensor trigging the airbag (for front collision). Regarding rc perhaps the sharks prefer digesting a crunchy stern compared to an airbag!
Regards,
Booster
yeap,all of them cept amer sports1 and djuice were farr boats.i’m a fan of bruce farr
Going back to the model, you realise this thing’s got to be going pretty fast to do damage to itself. 10kg moving at what 4 knots max if you’r lucky? that aint gonna break a decent bit of carbon re-enforcement at the bow! The biggest danger is being smacked by somthing else, but i think you cant do much about that.
Luff 'em & leave 'em.
My dear friends lorsail, lingley et al!
Well, I hope to move a lot faster than 4 knots. Using a non-monohull approach, as lorsail talked about early under this post. In such cases self-righting systems must be improved for the Volvo Ocean Race for rc. Incidently, the air-bag approch discussed by Wis can be an option here. A multi-feasability air-bag. Water activated approaches developed for life-rafts and life-jackets can probably be utilized. Again, the robustness of the systems must be valid. In this case the air bag must be able to both expand and contract several times (in contrast to that of cars). Self-folding of the airbag during contraction must be improved. In case of cars the air-bag is very neatly folded before usage. In our case it should be able to re-fold after usage.
Regards,
Booster
automotive airbags(srs)are considered as pyrotechnic devices.it would be a spectacular event to view an airbag deploy in your ocean racer.will scare the fish too;-)
My dear friends lorsail, morales et al!
Si tu valens, et ego valeo!
Regards,
Booster
the sharks too [;)]
Wis
if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it!
My dear friends lorsail, Wis et al!
Obviously, Wis and I answered Ed Morales rather simultanously. However, the valens/valeo I mentioned are not whales… Regardless of fish, shark or whale the air-bag perhaps is an overkill. We must solv the refolding problem. We cannot entirely trust the tender boat system. Let’s go back to the energy absorbing zones, at least regarding impact…
Regards,
Booster
In my opinion the boat could be built of carbon/ kevlar-not reinforced too much -thats just wasting weight and should be fairly small . Probably should have a keel that wouldn’t catch weeds and photo voltaic cells on the sails which probably shouldn’t be reefable.
A multihull would be useless because of capsize so a good old fashioned monohull with the battery being the ballast as much as possible-not as eficient as pure lead but maybe better in this case. A wind generator would supplement the solar cells in generating power.
The mast(s) would be integral to the hull and probably unstayed and filled with foam.
A Freedom type cat/ketch may be the best rig.
But I haven’t had time to read the rules yet so I’m not sure what is or is not legal…
Doug Lord
–High Technology Sailing/Racing
My dear friend lorsail!
Long time, no sea!
Yes, an unstayed mast, filled. As an alternative perhaps we can fill it with a compressed air balloon? Not so dramatic as an air-bag. Similar to lorsail I haven’t had time to read the rules yet so I’m not sure what is or is not legal… The compressed air ballon can be used to solv the knockdown/capsize situation as long as the air-compressor works (depending on solar panels and/or batteries). The ballon is simply retrived into the unstayed mast. Simulatnously with rotating out the sails, the ballon is retrived into the mast (if neccesary). Compare the Ljungstrom rig discussed under other post. Perhaps there is soft solar panels/fabric available, so one can have reefable sail/sails? In order to attract sponsors I belive the rc shouldn’t be to slow. If it is possible to achieve with a monohull I don’t know. Some knockdown/capsize certainly will interest mass-media and thus, the sponsors.
Regards,
Booster