You may know me already for building/designing my own r/c airplane models. I am still doing them, and will do them, but I’m not here for that. I want as well as building airplanes, master a new area of modeling- ship business. I am new to this, and I just hope that some of you have suggestions for how to design boats (like yachts). I am wondering of what weight shoul the vertical tail underneath the boat be in proportion to the boat’s weight. What material should I ise so the boat will not be too heavy, and will not leak.How tall should the mast be? All that stuff.
Boy, sounds like you are literally starting from ground zero… First thing you should do is get a hold of a couple good ship design books (Chapelle is good), and also learn some of the lingo, especially regarding what different parts of a boat are called… Rudders, keels, kinds of rig, that sort of thing. RC for boats is in many ways a lot simpler than with aircraft, but still has its own tricks of the trade (wish I knew a few of them!), and it is best to start out slowly. Think of some specific information requests and start putting them in here, and pick up a book or two on RC boats!
[#oops][#oops]Thank you for your reply. Yes, I thought I needed to read some books about this thing. I already requested some from my local library. I hope Chapelle is good. I thought of R/C, it is a lot easier. I am now thinking of a yacht deisgn I should make plans of, it turns out I need only a receiver, small batery, and one servo, and a transmitter. That is very cheap compared to airplanes, where you need 5-12 servos, ESC, a motor, strong battery and a reliable receiver… And all that has to lift itself up into the air. Mine did lift themselves up, still it is much harder than just figuring out the bouyancy of the boat!!! Can you please tell me how to configure the sails of the yacht so it succesfully maneuvers without any engine? (My books didn’t come yet).[#oops].
Thank you a lot,
Demosthenes.
P.S. Do you have any pictures of your boats that you could show to me here?
Actually you need at least a 2 channel radio with two servos or one servo and a sail winch - depends on the size of the boat. Most boats, up to a meter long will use one servo for the rudder, and a second servo to control the sheets to the sails. Generally, anything over a meter long will use a dedicated sail winch and a rudder servo. There are a couple different types of sail winch available. You can use a small bettary pack of 4 AA cells (generally 4.8V if you use rechargable bateries) to power the radio in the boat, some people prefer to use a larger 5 cell 6Volt rechargeable battery in the boat.