Solar Freaks

Hello all,

The 2010 national boat rules have now officially been finalised. Here's the final version.


miseli

Does anyone have any thoughts on revised boat rules for 2011?

Mal Mathie is the new National Boat Coordinator and he has some concerns with the rules as they exist, as do some of the boat entrants that have contacted me.

One thing being tossed around is to ballast the boats similar to the way the cars are. Perhaps by making the panels weigh (say) 1gm for each sq. cm. of area. The thinking behind this is to slow down the ultra light weight boats that merely sit on top of the water and to actually make them displace some water.

I am not a boat person but I felt the forum might be a good place to get some ideas.

Hello all,

As John has mentioned, if you are involved with the boats in some way (student, teacher or mentor) and have any thoughts then please list them on the forum. These will be brought up and discussed at the end of this year when considering rule changes for 2011.

I'm not too sure on the boat ballasting concept and I will have to admit that I didn't jump up and down in joy when it was first brought up. I am probably 50/50 now.

In my view, slowing down the ultra light weight boats is just a way of penalising all those that have made a bit of an effort.

Very few of the boats currently plane in good sunlight and I would have thought that such an achievement should be rewarded and congratulated. In weather conditions with anything other than good sunlight, where planing is unable to be achieved, it is the displacement hulls that are going be at an advantage.

It is true that bringing a ballasting system of some sort into the challenge might help even things out a little. This is particularly the case where boats using less than the maximum 350 square cm of cell area, or using heavier panels are concerned. I am all in favour of this.
In the last few years, however, many teams have started using the same ultra-light Scorpio panels anyway, so is there still a point? These days, the cost of a Scorpio boat panel is no more than a handful of the standard encapsulated modules (ie dicksmith modules) which are otherwise generally used.
It would therefore seem a shame to me to penalise the majority of teams when they are all using the same make of panel. I'm sure students would much prefer to have a gun of a boat instead of one that is being significantly weighed down and unable to demonstrate its full potential.

Although not ideal, basing ballasting on panel cell area will be near enough. Power measurement would just complicate things too much I would suspect. The 1gm for each sq. cm. figure that John has plucked out of thin air might be a little extreme, but who knows.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it appears that most boats that are not already using a Scorpio panel are most likely to be competing in the Primary/Junior division. Maybe panel ballasting could just be added to this division and the Senior division left unaffected?

miseli

I may be speaking a little out of turn since I didn't actually get to see a single boat race last year, but Mal told me that the quickest boats were so light that they hardly displaced any water at all. They didn't need to plane, they were already only sitting on the top of the surface anyway. The ballast idea was just something he had mentioned perhaps as a starting point for discussion. It can be likened to the bad old days of early solar cars when all they were was a solar panel on wheels. Today's cars are much more real world and carry considerable weight, yet advances in design and clever thinking means that they actually go much faster. If the designers of the senior boats are half as clever it shouldn't be any more of a problem for them.

john jeffery wrote:I may be speaking a little out of turn since I didn't actually get to see a single boat race last year, but Mal told me that the quickest boats were so light that they hardly displaced any water at all.

Yeah, there is some truth in that. With the Scorpio panels, the lightest boats weigh somewhere between 120g and 150g and that certainly doesn't displace a great deal of water. Still, from the video footage that I have of last year's nationals, most boats seemed to still be pushing through the water. Ok, most of them were displacement hull designs.
As far as I'm aware, only one boat was consistently getting up and skipping across the surface in high sunlight.
In the lower sunlights, it's the displacement hulls that should be winning.

Yes, getting rid of stick cars and adding ballasting formulas and everything was for the better of the car event. I don't know if adding weight to boats would however have much of an effect on the challenge. The same old hull designs would still be used but just sit a little deeper in the water.

I suppose a rule could be brought in just for the sake of changing something in the boat rules. For the most part, they have gone unaltered since the event first began.