Abstract
A SAILING yacht, being designed to attain the highest speed without the usual restrictive commercial considerations, provides an opportunity for the development of the ideal form of hull. If this is nicely balanced, the yacht keeps her course when heeled over, whereas if, on heeling, she tends to change course, she becomes a difficult boat to steer and can be described as unbalanced. In "A Law of Hydrostatics and its Influence on the Shapes of Sailing Yachts"—a paper read at the spring meeting of the Institution of Naval Architects held in March—Engineer Rear-Admiral Alfred Turner dealt with this question of balance. On heeling, the hull displaces an unsymmetrical volume of water, and may be considered as resting on the line of centres of buoyancy described as the metacentric shelf. This line does not form a plane curve ; it may be very irregular, and from its irregularities there may arise a variable tendency to alter course according to angle of heel. The author investigates this by poising transparent paper patterns of a set of cross-sections and, after setting out Bouquer's law of balance with slight modifications, explains, by reference to the characteristics of some thirty-six vessels of which diagrams are given, the rules he has formulated.
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Naval Architecture and Engineering. Nature 140, 597 (1937). https://doi.org/10.1038/140597a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/140597a0