Sizing up for seaworthiness
Reading the article in PBO January 2019 about how Roger Hughes built a beautiful model of a Norwegian Colin Archer boat, got me thinking about the natural laws of size. Roger not only wanted the model to look identical with the original, but also wanted it to be a sailing model. Since I enjoy building both full size yachts and model boats, I have often had to ponder over the physical and mathematical laws concerning the size of boats.
The way your boat looks has a lot to do with the size of the planet you plan to sail it on. The size of the earth gives us a fixed amount of gravity, which affects how everything around us is constructed, not least yachts. On a planet twice the size of the earth everything would look different, including humans and boats.
Things have a certain size, and if you change this size they won’t work as originally designed.
For instance, if you shrink a sailing boat to a tenth of her size you will get a boat with ten times more sail area in relation to its stability,
