Monday, April 30, 2007
National Embarassment
To those of you who slept in or haven't been paying attention, the American Boat BMW-Oracle mailed in a loss today against the Chinese, of all teams, losing the race after blowing a headstay after a gear failure. With points at a premium, every race is critical and losing this one is inexcusable. I wrote;blog text:"National Embarassment".This is an inexcusable failure on the part of the afterguard at BMW-Oracle! If complacency has already set in because your sitting in first place at the end of Flight #1, then its going to be a short trip to the next round and a long ride home. To have a repeat gear failure, the first day the breeze actually comes up and to take the Chinese foregranted is; and should be, cause for concern. Lets face it, Chris Dickson has never won the big one. For him and Larry Ellison, not to be onboard today, displays in short order the "cocaine attitude" that prevails on the BMW-Oracle boat. This takes nothing away from the fine job that Sten Mohr has done and is doing, but the bottom line is; anything short of BMW-Oracle winning the America's Cup will be abjuct failure. It's Ellison, that has raised the bar on this one, certainly not,(until today) an aloof America. So, boys, its to to drop your martini's, pull up your trousers, zip it up and get on with the job.From an American who is not asleep at the helm and spending breakfasts in Valencia. Mark Wharton Reid
Posted by Mark Wharton Reid at 8:40 AM 0 comments
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Interview with Gary Mull, 1985
Hey Racers!
Just a little bit of reading material, while your waiting for the breeze to blow in Spain. As predicted Mascalzone Italia will be force to be dealt with after knocking off the Kiwis. There will be a complete update posted on Monday and daily thereafter. -ed.
The following articles are from America's Cup past......
The following excerpt is from Twelve Meter Update; March 22, 1985.Interview with Naval Architect Gary MullGary Mull, is one of the 3 naval architects, which comprise the Golden Gate Challenge’s design team. He lives up in the hills overlooking Oakland and has a passion for his cappuccino machine. He is no stranger to 12-Meter yachts or to the St. Francis Yacht Club. Along with Heiner Meldner, from Lawrence Livermore Labs and Scientific Application’s Alberto Calderon, Mull is hard at work on the design plans, of what could become a revolutionary new yacht built to compete against Australia in the next America’s Cup.He was chairman of the International Yacht Racing Union’s (IYRU) technical committee. He has served on the keelboat committee which rules on 12-Meter yachts measurement matters and has designed 6-Meter yachts for the ‘uber successful StFYC program. In addition to working on the new 12-Meter yachts, Mull is putting the finishing touches on a 30-footer for Ron Moore and a new 36’ Freedom for Tillotson-Pearson in Portsmouth, Rhode Island.After flirting briefly with Dennis Conner’s Sail America program in San Diego, Mull brought the drafting board home to the Golden Gate Challenge, when an agreement was reached in November of last year. Though the idea of working with designers Brit Chance and Bruce Nelson was appealing, his loyalty to the members at the StFYC set the stage. Mull feels that the Sail America program will be a very tough team to compete against, but that the Golden Gate Challenge 87 boat has the best computer modeling capabilities of any of the competing challengers, foreign or domestic.Aside from designing yachts and his impassioned love of the art of coffee, Mr. Mull took a few minutes away from his tremendous work load to talk to us about his involvement with the America’s Cup and the new St Francis 12 Meter.Q - Will the lack of a trial horse to use as a yardstick, hinder your approach to the design of the new 12-Meter?A - It’s not necessary. We have a lot of information, certificates and good approximate shapes of the more competitive 12-Meter boats. Not exact, but good approximations. Unless, someone has an extremely well kept secret. But, I suspect that is not the case, because absolute secretsare hard to keep in this business. Also, I feel we have the best technical people in the business, along with the best computer modeling capability of any of the competing syndicates.Q- Was Ben Lexcen’s boat Australia 2 a true breakthrough under the guidelines or was he forcinga rules change for 12-Meters?A- The interesting aspect about the 12-Meter rule is that it is quite different from most rating rulesIn that it is a measurement rule, rather than a rating rule. In IOR, IORC, and MORC rulesIf a boat gets longer, the rating goes up. If a boat gets lighter, the rating goes up.On the other hand, if a boat gets heavier the rating goes down and if a boat gets shorterthe rating goes down. If the sail area goes up or down, the ratings go up or down. Ifthe stability of a boat goes either way so does the rating, etc. etc. But the 12-Meter rule is different in that there is no measurement of stability except for a limit on minimumdisplacement, based on waterline length. There is an extremely heavy penalty if you gounder the minimum displacement, but no credit if you go over.The international rules for 12-Meters simply takes length + sail areaand divides it by 2.37 and if it comes out a 12-Meter, you’re in business.It is a simple rule, if you want a longer boat, you get less sail area and ifyou build a shorter boat you will have more sail area. There are correctionsfor the shape of the boat at the ends and mid-section.The stickler in this is the minimum displacement, the structural weight of a 12-Meterdeck, mast, skin, frame, etc. is locked. Every 12-Meter has a minimum deck weightand hull weight in terms of pounds per square foot of deck and hull. That meansthe total structural weight of all twelve meter boats is very close to the same number.However, minimum displacement is based on waterline length. So if you take a nominalboat with a 45’ waterline length and make it longer, your structural weight won’t changemuch, but according to the rules your total weight has to. So you add the weight inballast. If you want a heavy air boat, you are in great shape under the 12-Meter rules,because when you make the boat longer, it has to get heavier because of the ruleand it gets heavier in ballast because the structural weights are controlled.Now, if you want to build a short boat like (Johan Valentijn’s) Magic orAustralia 2, the only area that you can lose the weight is giving it up in ballastsince the structural weight is essentially locked in. The fascination of the rule for thedesigner is to pick that combination of length and sail area that will give you enoughlength and stability through the ballast to sail right side up in a breeze and enough sail areato sail in light air. That is what Magic lacked, she tipped over and couldn’t stay up in a breeze.The keel for Australia 2 served that purpose admirably. By turning the keel upsidedown and putting four or five thousand pounds in the form of lead wings on the bottom, thecenter of gravity of the ballast shifted downward tremendously and given the weightincreased the stability of the boat.The hook in all of this is that the general idea of winglets and endplates hasbeen known for years and the most solid developmental work was done by an American,Richard Witcomb, at NASA in Langley, Virginia. An American syndicate mayhave considered it last time around, but probably felt that it would not be legal under the12-Meter rule against peculiarities.( Mull was on the Keelboat Committee during the America’s Cup races at that time in 1983and felt that at the time most committee members were against winglets and that they shouldhave ruled on the matter.-ed)Q- The St. Francis Challenge 87 is going to build 2 new boats, a “revolutionary” boat and thefirst yacht to be built will be an “evolutionary” boat. Will your first one be aninterchangeable parts boat like the New York Yacht Club’s America II ? Or, do youhave a specific design in mind?A- We definitely have a specific idea in mind for our first boat. There will undoubtedly a few adjustable parts, but frankly we don’t see the need for a sailing lab like America II.They seem to be doing a lot of tests that have been conducted before, like re-doingsailing proportions, going from a 24’ J in & out 2 or 3 feet, or testing the aspect ratio ofthe fore triangle.We have a group of some incredible talent, like Heiner, who is the guy who developedmost of these new testing procedures with the use of super computers in fluiddynamics with large scale simulations. We will take the best data to date and feed it into thecomputers and expound on that, for the first “evolutionary boat. At the same timecarry on some parallel work that is really far out, which will be used on thesecond boat. The first boat will not look much different in general detail (to other 12-Meterboats) but, the second boat will certainly be different. As a designer, I am having more funthan I can shake a stick at!Q- How will the new computers affect the shape of twelve-meter yachts in the future?A- 12-Meters will look like twelve’s for some time to come. A lot of the boats are havingproblems with water coming aboard and the new course changes in Fremantle onthe shorter legs will affect some of the new designs. “Will you want a boat that is more? maneuverable, since there will be a shorter time to the lay line, or do you want justpure boat speed?We have three computers and are probably going to acquire a fourth. We have agrowing library of computer software, some of which is just given to us by companiesthat want to help win the ‘Cup back. We can now develop different shapes in the computer.See what it looks like and then run it thru programs that will go through full stabilitycalculations of displacement and wetted surface, which are the static programs. We gofrom there to a series of structural programs, measurement programs and shape development.We even have a 12-Meter ratings program, so we can measure it in the computer. Thereare some dynamics programs which will tell us about performance potential of the boatin a variety of wind and weather conditions, starting with a velocity prediction program (VPP).In the old days, it would take at least 6 to 8 weeks to develop one concept. Whichled designers to be very conservative. We can now due most of it in a day! The next stepis we take this information out to the big super computers out of the office which do extremelycomplex panelization of fluid dynamic modeling which is very expensive and time consuming.But, we have cut thru most of the crap by then. We are still going to do tank testing with models about 22” long. The best part of all of this is that I’m having more fun with this than I canpossibly imagine. It is a kick!12-Meter Notes….While the other syndicates wade knee deep through waves of propaganda hype about there new boats, the Golden Gate Challenge attitude carries Skipper Tom Blackaller’s mantra; “cut the crap, we are going to build the best boat and we expect to win! ” “Period.”Physicist Meldner works out of Lawrence Livermore Labs on large scale super computer simulations of hulls and sails, along with Caldron, of Advanced Aeromechanisms, which designs wings for NASA. The design trio is joined by Alfred Buckingham, whose expertise is in sail design and fluid dynamics.The first boat will be built by Stephens Marine in Stockton, California. Initial testing will be in San Francisco Bay, with further testing off Point Montara. Blackaller and Challenge Chairman Bob Scott spent part of January down in Fremantle, Western Australia observing weather conditions and collecting data. They concur that some of the extreme conditions on the Indian Ocean is comparable to Northern California and this should give the St Francis boat a “home away from home, advantage”.As stated the challenge will design and build two boats, one “evolutionary”, which will be the result of the best 12-Meter data to date and expound on that. The second boat will be a “revolutionary” design that everyone hopes will provide a “breakthrough”. With Rule 27 on peculiarities thrown out by the IYRU last year, the door is now wide open for a far out design, though Mull feels that, “twelve’s will look like twelve’s for a while, no catamarans or trimarans just yet”…..little would we know! – ed.
