Mossy 757 wrote:How many twin tip airplanes do we have on the market? Have you ever seen a twin tip sailboat? Have you ever ridden a bicycle that goes backwards as well as it goes forwards?
Twin tip airplanes no, but if you turn the prop into a rotor, the resulting aircraft (a helicopter) is more than happy to fly forwards, backwards, or sideways. This is even better demonstrated by quad-copter drones that will happily buzz in any direction without turning. A fixed gear bicycle will pedal just as fast backwards as forwards...its just the human mechanics that aren't so good at pedaling or steering backwards.
And finally, the proa is a boat which is just as happy going forwards as backwards. In 1968, an 11 meter proa named Cheers placed 3rd (of 24 entrants) in the Observer's Singlehanded Trans-Atlantic Race (OSTAR) from Plymouth, England to Newport, Rhode Island, being beaten by a 15 meter and 17 meter monohull, which were high level at the time (open ocean racing catamarans and trimarans were just coming on the scene).
Now in all of these cases I'm comparing apples to....watermelons, and I'm really not trying to be contentious, but I do have two points. First, if you allow yourself to be limited by your existing views and beliefs, then innovation will always be out of reach. Second, I don't think the directional KBHF crowd should feel threatened in any way by the possible development of the TTHF.
I'll end with a final point. Flysurfer had the Flyrace board, which would do ok at local level races, but it was outclassed by the state of the art boards even at its introduction. It was a fine board for light wind, going fast, and an aspiring local racer, but to my knowledge it never won a major international competition. On the other hand, if you compared the Flyrace to race boards from 4-5 years earlier, it was competitive and perhaps even faster (I'm thinking Gen 1-2 North LTD for example). If a TTHF can be developed which has a respectable ease of use, and is as fast if not faster than an old Carifino (insert spitting noise) or a Gen 1 LF Foil Fish, then I say go for it, and I'm sure there will be a niche for it in the market.
JD