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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.
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.
>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.
I think the difference is that with a Kite-board, the sail isn't attached to the structure but rather flown as a kite and tethered to the floating device usually resembling a surfboard or a wake board. This uses an actual sail attached to an actual boat making it slightly different.
This is actually a record for the type of boat, one with the sails physically attached and pushing instead of pulling the vessel.
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!
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.
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).
It is about 167,024 furlongs per fortnight
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
That's how many acres per chain and per sidereal year, pretty please ?
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
Sigh,
The rider is attached to the board making the kite tethered to the board. The important part here is how it is fixed means it requires more or less materials and the kite-board can be way less by design. This means less weight is being pulled through the water, less of a craft is in the water also meaning less resistance. It is easier to get a kite board up to higher speeds because of simple physics. I said nothing about classification other then the differences between a kite board and a sail boat is significant when at those speeds. It's like comparing the speed of a motorcycle and car with the same horse power motors in them. They are both vehicles, they are both motor-vehicles, but one doesn't have the weight advantages the other has.
I think your problem is a different argument then what was made. The register statement said it was recognized by the World Sailing Speed Record Council as the first class B vessel doing it in a 500 meter course. This is a specific statement detailing a specific claim with specific conditions. I would have assumed someone as pedant as you insisting that tethered to the rider who is tethered to a board is somehow different from being tethered to the board would have picked up on the specifics of it. Please slow down and think about what was said then think about what you are going to say..
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.
>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
>I know you think using only knot
There's a reason why nautical miles are used. They are roughly one minute of arc along a meridian. They are what you use when you are out on the ocean, because that's the only thing that truly makes sense when you've got a sphere divided up into degrees, minutes, and seconds.
Also
American here, I know the english system (both imperial and not) and metric system of measurments and navigational measurements (which are neither "english" nor "metric" but are SI anyway). Instead of being mad at people using terms you're not familiar with, how about you go look them up and educate yourself?
By the way, they broke 65 knots average speed. You do the math to figure out how fast that is.
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BMO
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.