Maybe a counter example is welcome here.
Nils Bunkenburg was first associated with the revolutionary Flyer A-cat and then did the Hobie Fox and FX-one. What happened to the last two ? The first failed in comparison to the Nacra I-20 and the second well, even a bunch of upstarts chaired by dear old Wouter could beat that class/design.
Then he was going to blow away the F18's with his Nikita F18; does anyone still remember that design ?
And when was the last time Fisher did a competitive A-cat ?
Hell, when was the last time Greg/Jim (AHPC) designed a competitive A-cat and not buy one of another designer ? The Mark 5 is the answer, back before the turn of the millenium. After that one the licensed the Flyer (Aigner), the Tool (Mercer) and then stopped. The Capricorn F18 rig is completely off Gregs hands and he also modified the Capricorn hull shape before going into production.
Please name me the designers that are renowned in BOTH the A-cat class and F18 class.
I think we are looking for correllations that may well go either way, yet we seem to focus only on the ones we want to see. I know not of one designer that did a succesful A-cat AND a succes spinnaker boat. And yes that includes Marstrom as the Tornado is a Rodney Marsh design and the M18 and M20 are surprisingly unsuccesful.
Wouter
But Wouter all the boats you have mentioned in counter example have been very heavy high displacement boats namely the F18's and a lessor extent the FX1. They bare no resmblance to an A cat and require a totally differnt type of hull.
The F16 single hander though is not much heavier than an A and that is the exact point of my argument, that we shouldn't be thinking along the lines of F18's but more the refined A's.
My only doubt about this is the additional loads created by the spinnaker, but even here with the length of pole we have and the lift created by the flat spinnakers and the apparant wind angle we run I have thoughts that this maybe less of a problem than first thought.
