Item — HN Reader

Apparently the keel was noisy when down (creaking sounds I'm guessing?) and so they only put it down for sailing upwind.

Really there should be a 'stabilize' button in the cockpit that drops the keel and does the dozen other things that is probably in the runbook automatically so people don't have to think about what to do.

1 comments

for that amount of money there should be a movable weight machinery to automatically keep the boat stable similar to how cruise ships do. It would also improve sailing performance (and i remember that somebody (Oracle?)several years ago wanted to do that in big races, yet it was prohibited).

how fast do these machineries move? as I understand the weather scenario the wind direction was changing rapidly by more than 90 degrees at hurricane level. That means, the boat was unable even under power to redirect into the wind timely enough. The key question is, how much side wind can the design withstand without getting pressed into more than 45 degrees.

obviously lowering the keel affects this a lot, as there is much difference in leveraged 60 tons vs non-leveraged.

say moving 100tons 10m, like from one side to another, in 10 seconds - that, acceleration and deceleration, takes 200KWt - half the Tesla's electric motor. It is horizontal. As we may have heeling, the worst case - raising 100t vertically 10 m in 10 sec - 1000KWt, 2-3 Tesla's electric motors.