Berny,
I'm going to be a little confrontational here. Try actually understanding my posts, if you don't then there is no point in continuing this discussion. Your idea's won't work on the F16's and remarkably enough the pole setup in your picture will actually make the F16 poles alot weaker. This will requiring sailing with a much more beefed up pole and that goes against the idea of a lightweight F16.
Also Berny I've been into this field of spi pole design and experimentation since 1998. I have used your setup myself back then and I can tell you what its downsides are.
On my boat the pole would bend out of colom under spinnaker in anything over 15 knots. Luckily I had a bridle strop (which you don't) and that saved my pole otherwise it would have broken will sailing due to buckling failure mode. The solutions was adding the stabilizing midpole wires with a small upward prebend in the pole. Now the pole that was too weak for the boat and spi handle very well all I could throw at during 3 years. It was 35x2 mm alu pole length 3.50 mtr. Funny enough mr Rhino writes of this modified setup : "The high degree of constraint at the bridle and the much lesser degree of constraint at the end of the pole is a pretty gross violation the truss idealization." And he is correct in a theoretical sense, but in a practical sense this setup is much stronger and stiffer one then the former one. And accepting a small loss in accuracy it can still be modelled by a perfect truss model. That is when the upward prebend is not too excessive, in that situation the small bending can be approximated by a perfect hinge in the theoretical model. The results will still be accurate to 80-90 %
Since then a few new setups have passed on my boats and the final design is one extremely comparable to that on the Blade. I'm using a 40x2 mm pole now I don't know what the US sailors are using. 40x 1.6 mm will be most perfect. 40x1 mm will be to weak and 35x1.6 mm and less will be so too. Maybe the US sailors have a pole that is a little to much on the threshold. I know what the basic Blade design specifies and that is well tested and sufficient. I don't know to what extend VWM follows these building guide lines.
In your post you wrote :
Take the strut and the saddle out of the equation [not hard to do] and the problem, [if there is one] is solved. As I've already said, I don't see the need to have a strut at the bridal.
If you just take it away then the pole will fall down. If you replace it with a line (and somehow undo the hole that is already there) then you can't fit the jib for you have no attachment point for the selftacking jib sheet and the jib luff will be badly supported leading to a large grease in the jib sail. We have been there and tried it all when prototyping. I'm sorry to say but we are a few iterations ahead of you in pole design.
No further disrespect intended.
Wouter
