Design Analysis

They can articulate it into the wind and can kind of optimize it, but at some point you're caught with more than you want. At 70 or 80 knots, you're at the limit of stability. If you're running with the mast feathered and you turn the boat and put the mast broadside, you could have problems. That's in pretty extreme conditions. No one knows what will happen for sure. I'm sort of speculating.

How do the hull shapes differ?
The Ollier cats have more rocker (hull underbody curvature), and the maximum rocker is further aft. Their philosophy was to reduce wetted surface area in light air and get full sailing length when pressed up on one hull. The shape we chose is more evolutionary from the other cats we have designed. The shape that we designed has more wetted surface at low speeds when the transom is clear and knuckle is just immersed. The Ollier cats are designed with the knuckle out of the water. That's unusual.

Why unusual?
Because no one has done it before. I guess they did tank tests and convinced themselves that it was the right approach. In the past, boats we designed with more rocker pitched more than boats with less rocker. In our experience, excessive rocker causes the boat to pitch too much in waves, negating any theoretical smooth water resistance benefit realized by adding rocker.

Much has been spoken of PlayStation's new destroyer bows. How big are they?
Three-and-a-half meters (11.5 feet). The old bows were 2.8 meters (nine feet).

Explain why the new bows and sterns were added.
I disagree with some of the stories that said the boat was unsafe. The boat sailed fine. We went across the Atlantic three times. The boat sailed well; it was a fast boat. But as we all know, you can always improve.

The way we thought to get the best bang for the buck -- to make it faster -- would be to make it longer. For a variety of reasons. After we saw what the competition was doing... we were the first in the water. We didn't know what the others would do. Our boat ended up with a bigger rig, wider and slightly shorter than others. Now we have a longer, wider boat with a larger sailpan compared to others. There's not only a higher speed potential because of the longer waterline, but putting more bow out in front allows us to push harder. Contrary to stories I've read, the boat wasn't inherently unsafe; otherwise the guys wouldn't have gone across the Atlantic three times.

PlayStation's new sterns are longer than the old ones. The three Ollier boats have different transoms, particularly in length. How do different transom lengths affect performance and trim on these boats?
We added five feet. All that stuff's out of the water, so it's all sailing length at speed pressed onto one hull. Of the three Ollier boats, Innovation Explorer and Club Med have the same hull shape; the transoms are chopped at different angles. I can't comment about Cam's boat (Team Adventure's transoms are cut nearly plumb).

We decided to increase the total length to 125 feet and to get the boat to balance out correctly, 15 feet was added to the bow and five feet was added to the transoms. The increased transom length has also helped the transom clearance. The guys reported the wake off the back is significantly cleaner than with the 5-feet-shorter transoms.

The boats also have different beams, PlayStation being the widest at 60 feet. How does beam affect performance?
When we got our performance studies in the beginning, what we found was the wider we could make boat, the faster it would be around the world.

Essentially this was a backward design project. We determined the maximum loads that could be handled by the largest winches available and then designed for the largest, fastest boat that would not exceed these loads criteria. The wider the beam, the higher the loads, so the beam we chose was the maximum we thought we could achieve without exceeding our load limits.

We had a bigger boat on the drawing boards, but found the loads were just getting too high. Adding length increases loads a bit, but not as much as a proportional increase in beam.

Capsizing seems to be everyone's fear, but how hard would it be to flip one of these wide boats? Could a puff blow one over?
Yeah, we calculated it would take 90 to 100 knots to blow PlayStation over. It's a heavier, wider boat than the others. I've seen that the Ollier design team has estimated 80 knots for their boats. Something in that range. It's pretty scary in those conditions.