At 10:49 AM -0500 1/16/02, John Fereira wrote: >At 10:05 AM 1/16/02 -0500, John Winters wrote: >>Robert wrote: >> >> >>First I strongly recommend you tear out Derek's pages on boat design. He has >>packed an enormous amount of inaccurate nformation in a few pages. > >I realize that it's fashionable to bash Derek, but for someone that >wrote a lot of "inaccurate" information about boat design, he sure >has designed a lot of really nice kayaks. I know that a lot of >people find Derek strongly opinionated but in the class that I took >with him, and the time my wife and I spend with him just chatting I >found him to be quite charming. An inaccurate understanding of what is really going on does not preclude you from doing the right thing anyway. Sometimes even incorrect models will yield correct answers. Doctors in London thought the bad air caused colera so they sent their patients to the country where they happened to drink clean water and didn't get sick. Wrong reason, right result. I have used the "climbing over the wave" explanation for "hull speed". It is not accurate, just brief and easy. A boat can't really climb over something it is creating itself, yet as a quick and really dirty way of making other people understand what is going on it works fairly well. If you can do something that makes the wave smaller "(easier to climb over") the boat will go faster. The fact that this is because the boat is wasting less energy making waves and the waves are just a by-product of an inefficiency in the design doesn't really matter. The cause and effect get mixed up and for any real understanding it is a poor model. But if you don't want to go into a lot of detail and and get bogged down in the physics of how water moves and wave creation, "climbing over the wave" works. It is possible Derek understands better than he lets on and he is just being lazy and doesn't want to write a in-depth text on hydrodynamics. -- Nick Schade Guillemot Kayaks 824 Thompson St Glastonbury, CT 06033 (860) 659-8847 *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Wed Jan 16 2002 - 09:49:38 PST
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