Posting in the Open forum may not atract kids, but will certainly atract adult support for the general concept of a kids' cat. It also has the potential to atract support from builders.

I think it is positive to post from times to times some type of "progress report" or "project milestone reaching report" of the kid's cat concept in that (and others) fora, in order to familiarize people with the idea and atract further support.

I call this "internal marketing" and in the current stage it is even more important than normal marketing. And while we are at the subject of atracting support, I am sure that whatever plans Phil has for the Blade, he will also support this cooperative global project as well.

I see no need to press with binary "in or out" choices. As shrinks say, there are many shades of grey between white and black. He may be in and build the boat he likes. If this group does its work well and achieves a smart class with inteligent features and compromises, Phill might decide to change his boat to fit the class. And we may do exactly the same - as I already proposed with the mainsheet and tiller crossbar setup.

Wouter is right when he says that we need internal cooperation to succeed. I would only add that this must not necessarily limit personal initiatives. Things will progress well because we are all intelligent and cooperative enough to manage them without interfering negatively with the group's project. I fully trust this group's participants intentions, capacity and integrity.

Let's keep it going.

There is another thing that it's still worth to think about.
Is there people and clubs out there ready to build their boats, or do they want to buy them ready?
I have been doing some digging here and so far the interest is low for building even if I have promised to be the instruktor for the building for free!!!

If we want to compete with the Optimist, we must prepare to give the "customers" (clubs, organizations and individuals) the "product" they want (complete boats, kits, plans, builders list, etc.).

This requires atracting the big players, smaller professional builders, parts providers, etc. in order to reach all places where Optimists are used. "If it teaches sailing in Optimists, it can teach in a F12".

I believe it is best to start this work after the boat is defined and the class is minimally organized.

Cool beans RG. <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />

Good to see such encouraging developments.

Please, do NOT start with that "Cool Beans" stuff, I'm hearing too much of it already from my 14 yr. old son... <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />

I'm new to this internet posting stuff, so please forgive any overreaches in etiquette.

A couple of points. There seems to be some concern as to making these (f-12's) too dangerous. I'm not convinced that this is a real concern. We are talking 12 to 16 year olds here. Has anyone gone and watched 12 year olds racing 80 cc dirt bikes? Karts? Mountain bikes? Sailing is way, way safer. By the time they are 16 they are off the charts. The boats should scare 12 year olds ( a little, somtimes) and by the time they are 16 yrs old they should be a little bored, and be ready for something a little (lot?) quicker/scarier. It seems to me that any of the designs being batted around the site should accomplish this.

The other concern/focus in many ways appears to center on the SMOD vs OD vs very simple formula debate. This seems a tough nut to crack. In my experience in other sports, I tend to support simpler rules that allow more experimentation. The concerns are of course (though this is of concern in all the formulas, just to a lesser or greater extent) the risk of an "arms race" leading to higher and higher costs. Has anyone mentioned yet using a "claimer" rule to help stop this behavior.

For those not familiar with the concept. A "claimer" rule (these go by different names) works basically as follows. F12 boats should cost under 3000 Euros. Basically, any competitor can buy anyone else's boat at an event for a nominally higher fee. Say 3500 Euros. What sort of fool will spend 4000 Euros extra on his kids carbon hulls, when dad #2 can buy his "overvalued" F12 "special" for 3500 euros.

This works remarkably well in all sorts of motorsports where cheating is endemic. You see it especially in kids stock car racing where, for example, cars are supposed to cost less than $500. They have a $1000 claim rule. Everybody "runs what they brung", and costs stay relatively low.

I think a claimer rule would also help in SMOD and OD classes, as it would help limit the super-richies from upping the ante all the time.

This is further supported because (from what I have been able to read, anyhow) trying to spend money on the boat to make the thing faster is not nearly as effective as learning how to sail better. If your super expensive F12 special is just going to get claimed away, you might as well sail it stock, and learn to sail better.

Just a few thoughts.

Love the concept of F12 for the kids. I live in a place where there is no sailboat racing, and not that much recreational sailing (lots of power and PWC's though...). I might build one of these things for the kid though. I like the low cost, and the idea that they still go fast enough to get em excited with sail as opposed to power.

thanks

There is always a faster boat...even in one design...to have the "claimer" rule would just allow the more wealthy to buy the fastest boat at any given race...they would let someone else do the work and step in with a fat wallet and buy the fastest...you would make it easier for them, not harder.

Try explaining that to your kid who poured his heart and soul into building a boat… only to have daddy big bucks walk away with his pride and joy. The whole idea that you can keep the wealthy from buying speed is a false premise...even in one design they can buy a new boat every year of less if they so desire. The majority here are always saying that it is the nut behind the tiller, not the boat that matters…if you truly believed that…this topic of conversation would not constantly be in the fore front of nearly every discussion on class rules or boat design/construction.

Regards,
Bob

Cool Beans, Cool Beans, Cool Beans,....
OK, now I'll try to restrain myself. <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />

What is all this stuff about a war? You trying to claim credit for everything F12 is hardly a war unless you consider your ego as the combat zone... <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />

I'm not claiming "credit for everything F12", just the right to (commercially) use anything related to F12 even when contributed by others and the exclusive rights to my own design and to the class name and structure. The latter being largely the result of my work over the last 18 months as well.

There is definately a difference here !

At some point the rights need to be concentrated in one entity; otherwise growing the class and enforcing the class rules will be pretty much a impossible task. Some blowhards immediately equate this to dictatorship, but then again it is always easy to just blabber away without actually investing any time or money in the project.

I'm just interested in making this F12 project a succes and it is a rare occurance when a committee succeeds at something like this. They called me a dictator in the F16 class as well, and right now I'm not even a F16 class official anymore. Still the F16 class was succesfully launched internationally where many other miserably failed (Taipan class ?). Sometimes, if you want to get results, you just have to trust people.

Additionally, creating and building up a new class to critical mass takes literally 1000's of manhours. I think the F16 class costed me just over 4000 manhours in total over 5 years time. Don't you think that earns a person some ownership rights to the class ? If a company wants that kind of investment from me then they have to shell out at least some 60.000 Euro's in net pay. You bloody nitwit !

And I sure as hell am not going to spend the equivalent of 60.000 Euro's on the F12 class and have others walk away with the credit and earnings. That would make me a right fool.

Wouter

Welcome to the forums carlito. Look forward to hearing more from you in the future.

Note that not everyone involved in F12 is targeting 12+. Some are focused on the under-12 kids.

Its a good thing the disclaimer has absolutly no standing legal strength at all then, don't worry I checked it out.

Any wonder topics have moved to the open forum.

When your talking about engaging people to build boats for lots of kids under and over 12 years old, I don't think there is much commercial value. The value is from getting kids on the water then if they move on to serious competition as a young adult you can hope to sell them a serious boat.
I've ordered my first F12 kit and its not from someone claiming ownership of the F12 concept so sue me.

So your boat is not an F12 then, is it ?

We are still deciding with all people here (including you) on how the F12 design and F12 class will look like.

The guy who sold you your kit hasn't cross referenced it with us here, for all we know it may well violate one of the F12 class rules that still need to be finalized. If that happens then you are out of luck.

Apart from that you are free do to what you want.

And this is exactly why the rights claim was written down. We don't want every Harry, Dick and Tom to call their contraptions a F12, muscle in on the promotion done by others and confuse the wider public.

The F12 design will be what is decided upon on this forum, not what some "split off designer" thinks it should be. Any other design will most likely not be allowed in the class later on.

Who says so ? Well I say so ! And after putting in all those hours already I have every right to do so. On whose activities was this F12 forum started for example ?

Besides, distractors like yourself frustrated the F12 project last februari as well and when pushed came to shoove we couldn't dependent on these guys to do anything but complain all the time. So forgive me from considering this a passed station. Now, if any of you feels uncomfortable with me claiming rights to this F12 project then you are strongly invited to buy a Hobie rotomoulded boat, start your own class or just generally refrain from commenting. You had your chance to replace me as project leader several times , I even renewed that offer 2 weeks ago and there are simply no other takers (again).

So you are stuck with me (unless you want no F12 at all) and I'm not going to do all that work without coming away with some rights. Of course owning these rights still doesn't mean that I'll charge everybody for it. It just means the control of the project and class is well defined. Something that is important for a succesful launch of the class.

Wouter

Wouter you may want to get the latest issue (December/January) of Professional Boat Builder Magazine and read the article "A Primer on Patents" located on page 118.
Anyone can "claim" anything they want...you can fly over here to the US, stick a flag in the ground and declare it "Wouterland" but that does not mean you can enforce your claim in a court of law.


I understand to a point you wanting to be compensated for the time you put into this, or any other class...but what about all the other people who have contributed ideas and time? Blowing them off as being useless because they didn’t meet your narrow view of how it should be done doesn’t negate the value of their ideas. Their time is just as valuable as yours… If you are compensated, it only stands to reason that they should be too. How far do you take this? What is the real reason for the existence of an F12? It is looking like it is less and less about the kids all the time…

Regards,
Bob

You guys still don't understand do you ! ... And you probably never will, but here goes.

Without building a strong organisation around the F12 there will be no F12 class, just a bunch of amateurs fiddling around. We had that for 40 years now and no viable youth class was ever established for catamarans. You think there is a correlation here.

With regard to patents, nobody is asking for patents. Hell the laser dinghy can't not be patented in anyway, neither can the succesfully lay claim to the name Laser. But all that pretty irrelevant as you can' participate in any of the Laser class events unless you own a boat that is officially recognized by the class and a court of law can do absolutely nothing about that. There is no law that forbids an organisation from excluding you from the class if you do not satisfy the limits set in their class rules. Basically, legal jumbo is irrelevant.

You guys are all over the place and have no focus.

With a class hierarchy (and that includes laying the ownership rights somewhere) we simply don't have a class. If a design doesn't have a class then that design (and the concept associated with it) has a negligiable chance of succeeding.

All you guys are doing right now (contributions ?) is tearing the project apart like a bunch of wolves. And when it fails because of it we can all be very proud of ourselves that another opportunity was lost for a viable entry c.q. youth cat class again.

That is what we are talking about here. If I was getting off on power and control then I sure as hell wouldn't waste my time on creating a new sailing class. Such is project is more pain then it is really worth and I'm doing it because I can and I feel there is a need for it, call it passion.

For it to succeed I need control, I need to be able to control the creation of the class, its growth and the money flow so I can reinvest portions of it into the class. THIS IS ALL FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE CLASS WE ARE CREATING.

I'm intending to use the money earned to fund the class organisation and sell the more expensive components against cost. I'm going for advantages of production on scale. It will be alot cheaper and more performant if the class designs and orders the mast sections and then sells it on to the sailors. For alu extrusions there is a minimal batch size of 250 to 500 kg. That is 30-60 F12 masts in one go with a upfront investment of several thousant bucks. If there is no control then I can't justify some private party of investing in this as the risks of you guys running around for alternatives makes this economically very risky. Same with sails, rudders, etc.

Then the so called contributions. Most are of the form :"Hey, why not have only 1 rule that regulates overall length and everything else goes ?"

Like that the best we can achieve is Grob coming with a 100 kg rotomoulded F12, Retired Geek with a 50 kg all carbon foiling F12, Phill with an underpowered F12 and Wouter with a 60 kg F12 made from commonly available materials and having a more crude deep V-ed hull.

What do you will happen we we go to some national sailing association to make them aware of our F12 youth class and ask for their support ? They will laugh us out of the room so hard that it will hurt for years to come. And to top it off we have ones again confirmed to the mono guys that cat sailors are crazed lunies that disagree amonh themselves so much that can't even get one thing like a simple class right.

F12 was always intended to be more then just what a private persons wants for his personal situation. It is intended to because the international youth class for catamaran sailing (and not for some local aussie sailing club project) and a feeder class to the currently existing international cat classes like the H16's, A's, F16's, F18's and Tornado's.

Also guys like Phill, Paul and Wouter have spend several thousand of bucks (out of their own pocket) to get the F16 class up and going. I for one will never see any of that back again. Phill has his building fees to recouperate some of his costs. I get posters dissing me for something they could never do or are even willing to do themselves. Maybe, you all should compare your "hey, what if ... " postings and drawings to persons actually putting in the time and money to work out the details of each design, build it and build the class.

Now I'm going to do another class creations project, I'm one of the very few who can and who is evem willing to do it.

Now are going to help me make this a success or not ?

Wouter

Wouter, I think the lack of clarity over the rights issue is compounded by a lack of clarity over the project status, and even over who exactly is on board and to what extent. I see a number of issues come up in discussion here reflecting different views on what seem to be fairly fundamental issues - target age & weight, OD or Formula, stays or not, trapeze or not, multiple sail sizes, boards or boardless etc etc - and of course in the process of developing the class concept it's perfectly fine that these debates should occur and different ideas get proposed. The problem is that I don't see these issues getting clearly resolved to a point where there is a well-defined core group of people who reach agreement and move on. I do see your own views very plainly and consistently expressed, but it's not clear to me how much of this has broad acceptance and how much is your contribution to debates that are still ongoing. Maybe the people actively participating in the class development have a clearer view than I do, but just as an interested observer here the picture seems quite cloudy.

My suggestion is that perhaps on a weekly basis you post a project status note on the forum, defining exactly the current state of what has been agreed (and perhaps by who) and listing the open issues currently under discussion. Over time this should help keep the project moving forwards towards a more and more well-defined state and avoid having to revisit old issues. Perhaps each open issue could spawn a separate thread that runs till agreement is reached and the issue is closed.

I think your point about the need for the class to have a point of control somewhere is reasonable, but it only makes sense if what you have control of is well-defined.

Wouter you don't get it, youve missed the group with the greatest need and growth potential the under 12's we need them bobbing around next summer, we already have F14 for teenagers.
Wouter the reason all these good looking boats came about was you posting your square design.
The person I'm getting my kit from contributed to this forum and it will be F12.

You just can't stand the fact that people are actually looking at designs from boat/yacht designers and couldn't really give a [censored] that it should beat a laser by 2.1553672 minutes around the course.

First you say that you can buy your mast section at any aluminium retailer, but then want to re-invest portions of any incomings to fund 500kg worth of masts.

Jeff and I are building the same design, we want the boats out there sailing around, not continually comparing them to a laser in yet some other mathematical formula on paper.

And I don't know if you realise how stupid it looks when you poke and prod at obviously successful boat designers to try an extract information that they obviously don't wish to share with you at this time, especially when they have to put up with you, guessing, assuming and then dumping on there creation.

Yes, of course. Again, life is not a binary yes or no: some will help a lot, some will help less, some may go overboard and some may involuntarily work in the wrong direction. Besides the shades of grey, expect to see "whiter" and "blacker" situations <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

As far as I know, you are the only person ever who successfully created a class through an Internet discussion group. Please do it once again. I am sure everyone understands the difficulty to do it in a foreign language, being at the same time precise, polite, subtle, etc.

In order to avoid repetitive suggestions from those who want to help, but are unaware of the current project status (it happened to me more than once), the proper reply is "we passed this point already" followed by the project's program/milestones. Do we have one? If not, I'll try to prepare the first draft.

All the best,