Steve 1

Years and years ago when the UIM forced me to 10 meters, I chose canards to trim the boat in event of bow lift. You can see their shadows in my avatar on that Cat.

iamjoe

Hi Steve:

How did the canards work; meaning what triggered them, how were they controlled, etc.? I assume you've been following this thread and I'd be curious to know what you think about the idea of a computer controlled tunnel device as I have described. I think a lot of people are focused only on the race boat sector and some seem blissfully ignorant of the bigger picture, which in my mind are the many air entrapment type boats in the recreational world.

I know that so far, there haven't been any blow-overs in the larger offshore world (in terms of recreation), however I am equally sure there have been many in the smaller sport boat world. It just seems the best approach is to create a solution for a potential disaster BEFORE it happens rather than to wait until a boat-load of recreational boaters are killed and the sport goes through another black eye as it has recently. In racing, there is an assumption that something can go wrong that can result in injury and/or death. Not that losing three great people is "the cost of doing business" but the risks are known. No so in the recreational world.

Thoughts?

Steve 1

Mine were Cockpit controlled by the driver; way too many variables offshore to let anything else make the crew into passengers along for a nasty ride.

iamjoe

In my mind the question becomes whether or not a person can react quick enough and with the appropriate degree of reaction to divert disaster. With todays technology it seems that leaving control to something that can moniter movements hundreds of times per second and without the "human" emotion and/or human error would be prudent. After all, traction control, anti-lock brakes, fuel managment, automatic transmissions and auto-pilot all operate on the same premise. The idea would be to bring the situation under control before the driver even realizes things are about to go very wrong. I agree that there are many variables offshore, but there is also technology that can read and measure every one of those variables many times per second and be programed to operate within a certain set of perameters that would compensate for those variables in the event that something starts to go wrong.

Steve 1

I did a lot of testing with these in all seas and felt this was well within my reaction time (on a small boat yes automation), there was a model 12 Cheetahcat drawn (inboard) and ready to go to a customer, with a lot of control surface built on it, looked like something from Lockheed, but I never got back to build the boat, as world events precluded that.