Well, I read that post, but my question was for a general understanding of the matter.
Yes, a heavier boat is often more stable...but if the weight is added in the wrong place, then it can make the boat far less stable.
I understand but it's always difficult to do it right in practice.
Finding the center of gravity of your boat... Can I assume it's usually designed to be where the mast is or somewhere along it?
As for a multihull with four hulls in a diamond configuration... doesn't make much sense at all. First, the load carrying capacity would be much lower
Well, if the hulls are used as feet for deck structures like the SWATH....
So they all could be of the same design, and with the big deck structure it's easier to have them rigidly fixed. Virtually a big ship on four feets. I guess it would be very big for better deck to hull structure ratios, and many tension structures.
It is pretty easy to badly engineer a multihull... look at the "Tin Can" trimaran.
Yeah, concentrating the forces you want to reduce in one point is counter productive. :laugher
Finally, I'd point out that many multihull capsizes are actually not capsizes per se but caused by the boat pitchpoling after stuffing the bows into the back of a wave. This is one reason it is generally wise to leave a multihull a bit aft-heavy.
I also read in the wikipedia about that but somehow I don't quite get that bit.
Is there a visual explanation around?
However, unlike a monohull, a multihull is generally pretty light and doesn't have the inertia to resist accelerating during a gust, so it is a huge disadvantage to have the slightly lower amount of sail area up.
This is similar to vessels being to fast and lift off, too. I would imaging adding controlable hydrofoilers/wings to increase downward force for increased resistance in bad sea may help.
Or maybe watertaking bags underwater for increased mass but with no boyancy (or the reverse...maybe not). Don't mind my random ideas.
Cruising sized multihulls also have enormous initial stability... an order of magnitude greater than that of a similarly sized monohull. This tends to damp out any but the greatest movement.
How about underwater control surface. (Let's ignore port draft restrictions)
Hmm, reading all this I have the impression that ship technology isn't as advanced as aeronautics yet. But then aeronautics get lots of development money.
Btw. thanks for all the insights.
