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100km/h Sailboat Sets Speed Record
fustakrakich writes with news that a boat powered only by its sails has reached speeds of 100km/h for the first time. The team also claims to have reached 109km/h over a 500m course. The craft took the speed record back from kite surfers, who have somewhat smaller sails but a massive weight advantage over boats.
"Sailrocket 2 set the record last week, and the speed 54.08 knots (100.1 km/h) the craft achieved has been recognized by the World Sailing Speed Record Council as the new mark in Class B for vessels traversing a 500 meter course. The speed is higher than any other vessel recorded in the Council’s lists and is the only recorded speed over 100 km/h."
Gizmag has a more detailed article about Sailrocket 2's exploits, and says in an update that the craft achieved speeds of 121km/h today (65.37 knots).
no, but the laws of physics do allow the possibility of tacking in certain other directions faster than wind speed
...can it go straight downwind faster than the wind?
Not downwind, but it can at various sideways angles to the wind (on the reach) where the sail acts as an airfoil.
Yeah... but how many record breaking vehicles look anything like their normal versions? Boats, planes, cars, etc, there are always huge trade offs they have to make to get maximum speed.
The boat has practically no resemblance to any other sailing vessel. I'm mean yay!, you got the record and you took it back from kite surfers but your actual craft resembles a sail boat about as much as a kite surfers craft resembles a sail boat.
Well, it floats on water and has a hull (is a boat) and uses a raised structure to catch the wind (has a sail), so... it's a sailboat. A very light, one person sailboat.
Let's have a look at the Council's list that is linked in TFA and TFS. 100 km/hr is 53.996 knots. What do we see?
2010 Kite-board Alexandre Caizergues FRA Luderitz, NAM 54.10 kts
2010 Kite-board Sebastien Cattalan FRA Luderitz, NAM 55.49 kts
2010 Kite-board Rob Douglas USA Luderitz, NAM 55.65 kts
3 kiters in 2010 certified as going faster than 100 km/hr. Sailrocket's achievement of a new outright record is awesome, it doesn't need to be embellished (or damaged) with false claims to be first past a round-number threshold.
Remain calm! All is well!
>The boat has practically no resemblance to any other sailing vessel.
No, it looks like a catamaran with different geometry and hydrofoils.
The base machine is a cat - two hulls and a sail.
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BMO
The ultimate bar bet has been definitively answered by this vehicle which made 2.8 times wind speed directly downwind: downwind faster than the wind
Then there's race kiters who routinely achieve a VMG better than wind speed going downwind, though not by as large a factor.
The base machine is a cat - two hulls and a sail.
What strange breed of cat do you have there? I have three cats, and every one of them has two hinds and a tail instead.
Ezekiel 23:20
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=100.1+kmh+in+mph
Nautical speed is measured in knots, worldwide.
1 knot = 1.1507794 mph = 1.852 km/h = 0.51444444 m/s
I think the term you are looking for is "proa".
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
1 Meter is 3ft rounded down.
So, with that basic knowledge you should be able to approximate the speed.
Of course you will be further off the higher you go, but it gives you a general understanding.
How did this get modded insightful? An amazing engineering effort, and if you have ever been in a boat going more the 50mph that's fucking fast (and dangerous). Congrats to someone doing something interesting instead of sitting behind their computer.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Interesting fact — There's an 85% fatality rate for the speed record for any boat. This sport is extremely dangerous.
The sailing speed record is 80% slower than the overall boat record, so the sailing record is a little safer. Nonetheless, one of the SailRocket crashes led to the pilot having a broken helmet.
How fast could it go in a category 5 hurricane?
Looks more like a hydroplane than a hydrofoil. That's why the ride is so damn bumpy. Just designed such that it has to get up to speed before it gets up on the plane surfaces and skis on top of the water. If it was designed as a true hydrofoil with smaller winglets instead of pods and had more lift to get the hull clean out of the water they could likely cutdown on the bumpy chop and drag and even go faster yet.
There's even more interesting and spectacular footage of a crash in one of the related videos after the linked Youtube video ends. They really flip that thing. Suprised the two guys riding it didn't break their necks. The fact it ends up upsidedown also lets you see what's underneath it.
Then turn the pyramids in a rockery, and the Sistine Chapel in a storage room. Sometimes humanity has to do something just so that it has been done. You might argue that climbing mount Everest didn't bring any advantage to humanity, but you don't consider all the research that went into it, and all the spinoffs that end up benefiting you later. Perhaps the techniques that went into building this boat will allow your next car to weight 100kg less, use less fuel (or batteries) and as a return pollute less (yes, electric cars pollute too).
Sure. Just not for very long and it has to go across the wind for a bit first.
It's just a sailing outrigger canoe with hydrofoils. It looks different, but it's not really that radical. You can actually buy hydrofoil trimarans for not much more than standard monohulls that also don't look exactly like regular sailboats.
It is about 167,024 furlongs per fortnight
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
All high speed sailboats such as skiffs avoid sailing directly downwind. They 'tack' downwind, first one way, then the other. (Technically a gybe, but what the heck).
Even on my relatively slow cat, dead downwind is not the way to go.
"Cats like plain crisps"
That's how many acres per chain and per sidereal year, pretty please ?
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
I wonder whether it would be possible to design an autonomous, computer-stabilized wind/kitesurfer. Free of human limitations this could go faster still.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
The speed record has "Hydropetre". Which has vrious records.
The question perhaps is if Hydropetre managed to hold the speed over 500m, but I would guessed so.
The point about Hydropetre is, it is a real sailing yacht where you can live on during your journeys. (Albeit, as a hydrofoil sailer, it is a bit gewÃhnungsbedürftig)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Downwind always means: your maximum speed is the speed of the wind. (Usually you make less)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Sorry, are you complaining at those using the most green form of energy for a powered vehicle? Maybe you should think about where else the technology can be applied to. Also we would be nowhere without our culture, and sailing is a major part of that culture. All work and no play makes for a very dull, rebellious person.
I just love all you "back seat" drivers out there critical of this feat! This guy just went 100 km/hr in a sail boat!!! Nuff said!
My karma is bad. Don't get too close!!!
I think that's a lot more descriptive...
Thanks.
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BMO
I kind of for that impression from the video and him repeating "this is very very fast" a few hundred times... Unless that was a code word for "bring new foul weather gear... Mine is fouled..."
I know you think using only knots and km/h is cool and all, but given much of the english speaking world primarily still deals with mph for knowing speed you do everyone a disservice leaving it out.
The speed was 62.2 mph, which is damn impressive for a wind powered boat.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
>Looks more like a hydroplane than a hydrofoil.
After going to the website itself for the boat, the boat has one large foil 3/4 of the way toward the stern and the bow has a pod with a rudder. The pod on the stern is there only for low speed flotation as it is clearly completely out of the water at full speed in the video.
If you look at picture #5, you can see the foil.
http://www.sailrocket.com/node/298
If you go here: http://www.sailrocket.com/sites/default/files/VSR2-force-alignment.jpg
You can see the foil is bent where a significant portion is parallel to the sail to help counteract the lifting force of the sail and sideways force of the wind itself.
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BMO
They allow the possibility of going faster than wind speed going straight downwind as well ... almost three times as fast, so far.
(hint: if the sail is a propeller, it's blades are not moving in the same direction as the rest of the craft).
I'm gonna get all pedantic on your ass. So apologies ahead of time.
>implying that chains are obscure
No, no they're not. They have been used in all English speaking countries ever since that guy Gunther came up with the system in 1620 ... all the way up to the middle of the 20'th century. If you ever found yourself in a land evidence vault in any city/town hall in any English speaking country, you'd find chains and links in all sorts of deeds predating the invention of steel tape.
With a little bit of adjustment, making a chain a decimal fraction of a nautical mile instead of 80 chains being a statute mile, the meter would have never stood a chance. A nautical mile is 92 chains and 6+1/4 links. If Gunther had made his chain 1/100'th of a nautical mile, we'd still be using it today instead of abandoning it in the 1940s for decimal feet and meters on steel tape.
And btw, 1 acre is 10 square chains. 1 statute square mile is 640 acres, since a mile is 80 chains.
1 mile = 80 chains
1 chain = 100 links
1 acre = 10 square chains
It's a nice self-consistent system that only needed a little bit of a tweak for it to be used on steel tape and other measurement technology. It was revolutionary when Gunther came up with it, since it suddenly made land surveying math standardized and *easier.*
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BMO
Or perhaps they are helping to make your next windmill more efficient, since their sponsor is probably interested in some of the aspects of their work.
Although most of their recent work probably is more interesting for boat and propeller designers, since much of it was centered about not having the t-foil sword cavitate, to loose speed.
Thanks, information bearing pedant !
Though I hoped someone would have catched the references to Vangelis' Albedo 0.39 and Pink Floyd's Another brick in the wall.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
Just for reference, we were hauling close in a fresh breeze in my Mom's Kettenberg PCC on San Francisco Bay (thats going almost straight upwind into a gnarly breeze, for you landlubbers) at a stunning two or so knots, and the Old Salt at the tiller kept going on about how lightning fast the Antigua is. I didn't RTFA, but I reckon the hull on that boat is Carbon Composite, &c. ; 54 knots on water sounds pretty scary.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
In sailing, perhaps. Not necessarily true on land: here is a summary of the event shown here on YouTube.
Your mom's sailboat has a basement?
Sorry, I've studied physics, but I have no idea how many yards are in a mile.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Yours hasn't? It's indispensible for stability.
A chain is 16 and a half feet, BTW. I use chains as the basic unit on the farm, spacing trees, fencing pasture, &c. Just being arbitrary, but why not?
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
No, a chain is 4 rods.
A rod is 16.5 feet.
If you take a mile, in feet, and divide by 80, you get 66. This is the length of a Gunther's chain. If you further divide by 4, you get 16.5 feet, a rod.
If the chain in your hands is 16.5 feet, it will have 25 links.
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BMO
Two possible replies: (1) you didn't study very much physics (since understanding and remembering units is kinda critical), or (2) try dividing 5280 by 3 . :-) :-)
And, yes, IAAP.
I suppose you could do better by deconstructing down to the ISO definition of the meter in terms of wavelengths of a certain hyperfine-split atomic emission, but since this is for sailors, who cares
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
I studied a lot of physics (indeed, I am physicist), but nobody in physics uses miles or yards. Yes, I've learned a lot of units. I can tell you how many joules an electron volt is. I can tell you how many pascals there are in a bar. Or how many fermis in a meter. And yes, understanding units in general is important, as is understanding the units actually used in physics. However miles and yards are none of those. And no, it's not just that I did choose not to learn them. They are not taught here.
I can only guess: There's maybe an unit so that a yard is three of those units, and a mile is 5280 of those units?
Yeah, who cares about miles and yards when sailing, when the unit used on sea is the nautical mile (which is 1.852 km; and no, that I didn't have to look up).
And BTW, you are quite out of date with the definition of the meter. For quite some time now it has been defined as 1/99792458 of the distance the light travels in vacuum in one second.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Hey, this is in my hometown, and the Yacht Club is one of my favorite hangouts. When they broke the record, there was quite a bit of cheering and booze going around. And the next day it was even more windy - go figure. Seriously, though... this is seriously fast. The fastest I have ever been on water was in a fast rescue boat, and that could only manage 36kt, while this baby was touching 60kt... they are currently doing some checking and final preparation, and then will try again to break the 60kt barrier. Interesting fact... several sailing speed records are held in Walvis Bay... look it up sometime!
They already jacked up the record. Go to the site!
That is not sail boat.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
Is that VMG being compared to the windspeed at the surface or at the altitude of the kite?
Up until just recently these records had been set by windsurfers and kitesurfers using very mainstream looking gear.
In fact the linked gizmodo article even has a section on how accessible that equipment is. As an example: The second fastest time set by a windsurfer this week (which would've been an outright 500m world record as recent as 2010) was set using off the shelf production equipment that anyone can just buy.
What the article doesn't say, though, is how the crew avoid spilling their gin & tonic... ;)
There's a reason why nautical miles are used.
Yes there are.
Also to set up the rest of the post, the remainder of your sentence should have been "in the article summary" since that is what we are talking about.
They are roughly one minute of arc along a meridian.
That is not why knots are used in the article summary.
They are what you use when you are out on the ocean
Yes they are. How many Slashdot readers on out on the ocean as they are reading this? I would wager the answer is so close to none as to make no difference. How may actually run a boat? I would wager the answer is still quite small, say 0.1%.
The use of Knots in the summary I really don't have a problem with, they do sound cool. But they have no relevance to any of the readers. Presenting data also in km/h does have relevance to lots of readers, but I would bet no more so than mp/h does. So by omitting one huge segment of the readership you are either a bad writer or simply trying to look cool by showing how you ignore mp/h even though it would provider far better context to a huge number of readers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Even in countries where everything has been stipulated in metric terms for a long time, Imperial measures sometimes die hard. The area of a property I recently sold in Western Australia was listed on the title as 10 perches (i.e. 1/16 acre, or ~253 m^2).
Bullshit.
Double bullshit. I win.
Not everyone is in a land-locked state
BZZZZT! it's about EXPERIENCE.
More than 50 percent live within an hour's drive of the coast.
So what? I live within an hours drive of many large lakes and the mountains. I've not been on a boat or skiing in years.
But the real point is that very few people will have the EXPERIENCE to understand what 50 knots is or feels like. Is that like a train? A race car? Coasting down a hill on a bike? Most people KNOW from driving what a number in mp/h or km/h feels like, they have no idea what a specific number in knots really means.
Just go up to any random person and tell them to guess how fast is 60 knots is compared to a car.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That has nothing to do with on land or on water.
Sailing means: it uses a sail.
The links you show use a windmill, likely linked with a gear down to the wheels. You can do (and it is done) the same at sea.
Nice links though!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.