I think we all want to go faster, that's why we (most of us) left monohulls for cats in the first place. I'd love to 'foil', even race a foiler, once it all gets sorted out.
I'm just trying to look ahead to see if there might be some unintended consequences coming in the way of designs, if full on foiling is approved.
I guess we can sit back and watch what happens in the US A Cat class in the next two years, since they basically said that's what they are going to do. Is there a better hull shape to hold the foils? I was thinking they might want to move the foil boxes further forward, perhaps in front of the main beam, to prevent the hobby horse effects we see today.
Seems to me that putting the major lifting foils further up front would prevent a lot of the nose dives. If you move them forward, you could share the load with the rudder foils too.
Of course you'd then have to engineer a way to lift them up, unless you just leave them down and park in deeper water, like the Moth guys do.
Timbo,
The problem with that is that in order to have stability and control as you transition through lifted flight and non-lifted motion, the main lifting elements need to carry a large majority of the load...just like an airplane. If the foils are moved further toward the ends of the craft (sharing more lift between the boards and the rudders or the wing and the elevators), the dynamic changes in lift as it transitions states is wild and difficult to control. This was one of the (re)discoveries that the America's cup campaigns discovered...they had to put the boards near the CG of the boat - otherwise it would porpoise wildly when it tried to get into the air and was unstable while transitioning. It is the same reason that the main wing element on most aircraft carries almost all of the weight of the plane.
