Our vision of a “sailing submarine” aka a sailing ship with a submerged hull requires a set of sensors and actuators to compensate the absence of stabilizing buoyancy, caused by minimizing the ship’s volume near the water surface. While the design is supposed to reduce the response to sea state and minimizes the stalling bow[…]
In free-style scale model prototyping one can daydream into that microcosm, where you can do miraculous pointy-headed things you could never do in full size reality. A good example for this is to use air balloons from the jamboree store to level and balance the shiplet’s position and mass distribution inside the tubular ballast tanks.[…]
Inspired by the DynaRig, designed in the 1960s by the German engineer Wilhelm Prölß, we decided to equip the shiplet with likewise sviveling, but static sails. We will use radio controlled servos to manually rotate the konvex profiles within our pivoted mast supports, also to test detrimental positions and situations. To start with, we use some[…]
Finally the shiplet got painted. Sincere thanks are given to Cadus for providing the space for the paint job and to Tuomo for providing the coloration. Now we are of course really eager, ney, we are thrilled, excited, super curious, on tenterhooks, … (!!!) to find out, if all our calculations and estimations about downforces[…]
… and waiting for the colors (and sails!).
After we planked the outward flat top of the deck with 0,5 mm ABS, it is now time for building the rounded deck cover profiles. Thanks to the marvelous invention of 3d printers, we prepared (printed) a set of supporting archs (green), which will be the starting point for our construction. Sidewise the archs will[…]
The shiplet’s deck is mounted on 9 fin-formed pylons, 3 edge-gated on each side connected to the under water side tubes and another three in the middle of the deck, connected to the nose, center and tail of the central hull. We also use fin-formed shapes for the flapping stabilizers and other horizontal connections. It[…]
Even though the shiplet’s deck is supposed to hover above the waterline and to never even touch it, we thought it might be a good idea to design it like a ship itself, which will swim (… just in case …). After finalizing the carbon fiber framework we plank the rounded floor section with 0,5[…]
Using the wind as a driving power for the shiplet requires of course some sort of sail – a field of design with a lot of interesting developments and alternatives these days, be it Flettner rotors, (inflated) wing sails, DynaRigs, kites and other concepts. In an early stage of the project the Flettner rotor was[…]