bigcane wrote: ↑Thu Mar 21, 2019 8:19 am
Sweeting looking foil, but I wonder if they will update the wingtips to flatten and put in some more twist like Moses, chubanga and ML have done. Seems to really help with the tip ventilation.
I've wondered that as well, from a pragmatic standpoint it seems unlikely that this will get tweaked a ton because they had to buy some really high-end expensive molds to be able to manufacture this at scale from the original design. I've talked to the designer at Delta, George Hradil, a ton about how this all went down, and he was absolutely stoked with the quality and precision of the manufacturing process once they found a partner who was willing to do things the right way. In order to do the manufacturing, he said he had to increase the thickness of the strut a bit but found that it was just as fast and a LOT more stiff this way (because stiffness increases exponentially with thickness). He said this led him to go back to his hand-made race foil and redo the thickness and add more ultra-high modulus to match what he was seeing in the deflection tests from the manufactured version. I have one of those Delta's and side by side with the previous generation strut, you can see the difference in thickness. Subjectively, we haven't ridden each others' boards back to back enough to see if you can feel a difference.
So all of that said, I think this product could be slower to track the cutting edge of hand-built foils because it's being designed for scale manufacturing; I'd watch for that development to come out in the Delta race foil as that will be a better indicator of progress in wingtip technology.
It would seem that we now are close to the plateau of fast hydrofoil design and so anything you buy now will still be good in the next years and so the need for one design is fading. Same for kites, I think for the average racer the second hand r1v2s, sonic races, PLs etc will be just fine. But it could also be a good idea to have an open tube kite class at events to encourage participation, just have to put in some minimum wind limits like 10 to 12 knots for the tubers.
Yeah, and if that's the case and Cabrinha is positioning this as a One Design option like it seems they might, then I think this design is probably not going to change for a long while, if ever. That said, these things go 33+ knots and have beaten other high-end foils in testing between some very good racers that I know, so like how much do we really need to tinker if it's not intended to take down the ML or Chubangas of the world?