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Again this forum fails to see the genius at work here. In gas turbine engines, the shroud around the hot side of the turbine is abrasive, to provide optimal sealing for efficiency even as the blades experience thermal creep. Doug has replicated this solution at zero cost by leveraging...

I see your point, but following that logic wouldn't it be safer to, say, not equip your boat with any downwind sails? It'd be safest to just carry storm sails for that matter. Having a boat that can sail off a lee shore in a gale is safer than one that would require functioning engines to make...

Apparently the whale agreed with you.

What a dumb video. Just because you have a lot of sail area doesn't mean you have to use it all. If you re-ran the calculations with a reef in for the performance cats you could equalize the stability numbers. Reminds me of arguments in the motorcycle community, with Harley guys saying their...

Three years ago I put a new lead acid bank in my trawler. I was on the fence, but the LFP available then wasn't well tested & it was expensive. I was tempted even in an application where weight was irrelevant, but in the end went with flooded lead acid. If I'd had a catamaran I'd have...

I want to be a whale gun operator when I grow up.

Yeah NMC shouldn't really be a candidate for a boat. Surprised to see it in the video. LFP is a great chemistry, I don't see the argument for going with the riskier and more expensive NMC in exchange for a small weight advantage. Good BMS is key though.

The Atlantic 46 story confirms my hypothesis - they eventually had to abandon ship, but only after several hours once rescuers had arrived. They weren't about to sink, they just couldn't make headway and were 1500nm from land. RAINDANCER and the J/World J/120 sank in minutes - a much much much...

Holy crap, what a story. Thanks, I hadn't read it before. These accounts are pushing me into the "multihulls are safer" camp. I don't like the whole sinking thing one bit.

Recently worked on a pilot green hydrogen project for a client. Talk about a unit conversion nightmare - offtaker was used to US natural gas units which are insane. Megawatt-hours to decatherms or mcf (thousand cubic feet)... imperial thermo units are the absolute worst.

I have a variant of this; blindfolded or not, if you ask me to tell you which direction something is without providing me navigational tools, I will unfailingly point in the opposite direction. Given to a smarter man, this gift would be extremely useful.

Wow. Are these the guys who sank? If so, a 1976 KP44 - textbook bulletproof blue water cruiser, sunk by a whale in under 15 minutes. Very scary stuff. Not to derail the thread, but this does provide an affirmation of the argument for a multihull I think - might have been holed, but would not...

Best case failure mode is a freak 15kt gust on the beam knocks her down under full sail in 15' of water during one of his endless attempts to get the rigging sorted in light air. She down floods immediately and sinks to the bottom, and everyone kick-paddle kick-paddles to shore safely with no...

What the cluck was all that about???

So we can infer from this that his portholes are indeed awash in 5-8 knots of wind with the main 2/3 of the way up. Yikes.

I'm in the renewable energy industry and we have a saying: "There are liars, damned liars, and battery suppliers" This stuff takes a lot of time to scale from the lab bench to production - rule of thumb is 10 years and $10B to get to factory scale. Lithium-Ion was conceptualized in the 60's...

That looks like 5-6 knots of wind? Mains'l is only about 75% hoisted. That looks like an unhealthy amount of heel to me; no wonder it scared the crap out of Doug. Also a great angle for viewing the wavy sheer line.

Wow. So now they're gonna have: diesel -> 4spd automatic tranny w/ torque converter removed -> transfer case -> variable pitch prop So 8 available gears, plus the variable pitch. What's a used marine tranny run? $2-4k? He's probably spent that on pumps, oil & pig mats for this...

One of the least appealing things to me when I consider switching to a multihull is the "sailing to the numbers" thing. As a long-time mono/dinghy sailor I love the feedback heeling provides & dislike staring at (and repairing) instruments. My current semi-attainable dream cat would be...

There we go! Come on people, pick it up a notch!