The Sunwake Project

Lines plan SW-LP01 Rev 0a#

Sunwake SW-15 · SW-LP01 Rev 0a · August 2026

Status: preliminary, for design development — not for construction. This drawing shows that the specification can be represented by a fair chined hull and serves as the geometry brief for the naval architect of record. Final fairing, CFD and contract lines remain within the architect's scope. Drawing sheets: drawings/sheet1-lines-plan.svg (lines and offsets), drawings/sheet2-profile.svg (character), drawings/sheet3-sections-and-facets.svg (midship section and the facet study). All three are generated from the table of offsets below by calc/scripts/make_drawings.py; they cannot disagree with it.


Revision history#

Rev 0 — single chine below the design waterline, two strakes per side. Solved to the target hydrostatics and retained as the hydrostatic basis.

Rev 0afour strakes per side. The hull form study was used to test whether more facets would improve the early two-strake hull. It shows that Rev 0's single deep chine cost about a percent by its placement alone; two working chines plus a boot seam cut the total penalty against round-bilge strip plank to a few tenths of a percent, which is better than tortured-plywood radius chine, for about 150–250 build hours. Rev 0a sections are re-derived holding station areas, the design waterline curve, draft and sheer identical to Rev 0. The chine lines are faired with monotone piecewise cubics; re-integrating the published offsets closes displacement to within 0.2 % of target. Hydrostatics, the berth check, machinery and styling are unchanged.

What Rev 0a is#

The demihull is four developable strakes per side — bottom, bilge, upper bilge, topside — so eight panels go round the whole canoe body, plus decks. Two working chines turn about 39° and 18° amidships. A third seam, the boot seam at z = +130 mm, turns only about 4° through the midbody: it is the longitudinal plywood joint the 1.9 m topside needs anyway, taped rather than butt-blocked, and it is not a working chine.

The bottom panel carries 11° of deadrise amidships and warps to a steep 72° V at station 1. Above that: a hump-free sectional area curve, a fine hollow entry, a straight 6.5° run, a lightly immersed transom running out into integral stern platforms, a stem plumb at the waterline with a 0.30 m spoon above it, and a sprung sheer — 1.97 m at the bow, 1.32 m at its low point 11.8 m aft, 1.40 m at the transom.

The demihulls are identical and symmetric about their own centrelines. One jig can be used for both.

Achieved hydrostatics#

Computed by integrating the table of offsets below (calc/sunwake/hydrostatics.py), at the design waterline, half load, seawater 1.025. The right-hand column is what the design brief asked for.

QuantityAchievedTarget
Displacement12.68 t12.70 t ✓
Demihull BWL / L:B1.404 m / 10.681.40 ✓
Draft, canoe body0.675 m0.62 — exceeded, see finding 2
Cp0.5920.57–0.62 ✓
Cm / Cb / Cwp0.735 / 0.435 / 0.731
LCB53.9 % LWL53–55 ✓
LCF58.1 % LWL
Maximum section area0.696 m² at 60.1 % LWLslightly abaft midships ✓
Entrance half-angle, first 1.5 m of DWL5.9°, hollowfine entry ✓
Transom waterline beam / immersion58 % of maximum / 109 mm55–65 % / slight ✓
Run angle6.5°, dead straight< 8° ✓
Volumetric slenderness L/∇^⅓8.17
Strakes per side / working chines4 / 2 plus a soft boot seam
Panel turns amidships39° (chine 1) / 18° (chine 2) / 4° (boot)
Bottom deadrise, midships / station 111° / 72°chined V, steep entry ✓
Wetted surface, canoe, both hulls48.4 m²
Waterplane, both hulls / TPcm30.80 m² / 0.316 t/cm
KB / BMt / GMt (KG estimated 1.85 m)0.44 / 15.9 / 14.5 mno resonance overlap
Beam at deck, per hull / overall2.29 m / 7.29 m7.1 — see finding 3
Queen berth check at a 0.70 m platform1.65 m clear at the foot1.52 m ✓ (+131 mm)
Sectional area curvehump-free, monotone about its maximum

Two independent routes to displacement — integrating the lines, and summing the weight ledger — agree within 0.2 %. The test suite checks this agreement during regeneration.

Flagged changes to the specification#

These are the places where the drawing moved a specification number. They are carried here and applied at the specification's Rev 1, per the project's change control.

  1. LOA 15.3 → 15.60 m — the 0.30 m spoon stem plus 0.30 m of platform beyond station 10.
  2. Effective LWL 15.0 → 15.30 m. The performance tables stay quoted on 15.00 m, which is the conservative reading and the integration basis.
  3. Draft, canoe body 0.62 → 0.675 m; to prop tips 0.92 → 0.95 m. This is the one hard rub: the Bahamas banks margin goes to zero. Levers in finding 2.
  4. Beam overall 7.1 → 7.29 m at the deck flare. Trimming the after flare to about 15° holds 7.1 m if the figure matters; it costs nothing hydrodynamic.
  5. Construction: four strakes per side. The brief's carried "chine tax about 2–3 %, accepted" improves to roughly half a percent.

Findings for the next phase#

1. Four strakes provide most of the available hydrodynamic benefit. The full ladder is in the hull form study. Four strakes is the knee of the curve and outperforms the radius-chine case without moulds. The as-drawn hull sits slightly above the ideal four-strake point because the closure solve sets chine height to carry sectional area; it does not optimise chine placement. Refairing may recover another few tenths of a percent.

2. Draft, not power, is the binding constraint at this loading. Cp solved at 0.592 with LCB at 53.9 % and the sectional area curve stayed hump-free without being forced. Every route to shallower water goes through beam or fullness, in this order:

Hold 1.404 m for the general arrangement; carry the refair as the live option.

3. The queen berth fits comfortably. There is 1.65 m clear at the foot of a 2.03 × 1.52 m queen lying between 10.40 and 12.43 m with the head forward, and 1.74 m at the head — 131 mm of margin on the mattress. The under-berth void, at least 1.0 m deep and 1.1 m wide, takes the 64 kWh 352 V island with room for the 96 kWh growth. Standing 2.05 m in the dressing well; sitting 0.76–0.84 m over the mattress with the optional trunk coachroof, 0.62 m without, so trunk lights stay an aesthetic choice rather than a necessity. See accommodation.

4. Machinery and accommodation fit within the same hull envelope. Motor bay 13.35–14.55 m with a working width of 1.13–1.18 m; one 20 kW variable-speed generator per hull; about 600 mm propellers behind partial skegs with line cutters; a 300 L integral keel tank per hull at the LCG, with about 635 L of volume available below z = −0.25 m. This allows total tankage to grow to 800–1,000 L. Water and holding tanks forward of the battery bay. Crash bulkheads both ends; watertight bulkheads at 1.50, 6.00, 9.90, 13.35 and 14.55 m.

5. Twin-hull interference at s/L 0.33 is quantified, and it is the first thing CFD should check. The Michell model puts a favourable dip at 7–7.5 knots, where the two wave systems partly cancel and the pair makes about 76–80 % of the wave resistance of two independent hulls, and an interference hump at 8.5–9 knots, where they reinforce and the pair makes about 145–148 %. That is directly on top of the boat's silent-cruise and single-generator passage speeds, making this result a priority for CFD validation. Chart: drawings/chart-interference.svg.

6. The aft run-out of the upper strakes is a detailing item. [ENG] Near the transom the boot seam stops being soft: its turn grows from about 4° amidships to roughly 20° at station 9 and 28° at station 10, and chine 2's turn grows the same way. Whether chine 2 should instead sweep up through the waterline to the transom corner — standard chined-stern practice — is a question for the refair, taken together with the unrolling check.

7. The maximum section sits at 60 % of LWL, slightly further aft than the 57 % the original solve reported, because the faired interpolant peaks between stations 5 and 6 rather than at a tabulated station. The sectional area curve is flat enough there that this is a fairing question, not a form question. The naval architect should hold LCB in the 53.5–54.5 % band while settling it.

Table of offsets — Rev 0a#

Millimetres. Heights z are measured from the design waterline, positive up. Half-breadths y are from the demihull's own centreline. Stations at 1.500 m. β₁ is bottom-panel deadrise.

Stx (m)Keel zChine 1 y/zChine 2 y/zBoot ySheer y/zDWL yβ₁
00.05−4054 / 1965
11.50−48052 / −321101 / −161187488 / 183714972°
23.00−632176 / −466276 / −238383737 / 172034543°
34.50−675268 / −556415 / −290536903 / 161449924°
46.00−675315 / −590506 / −3156531031 / 151961015°
57.50−675339 / −605556 / −3287231107 / 144967612°
69.00−675344 / −605572 / −3307521143 / 138570212°
710.50−622333 / −566562 / −3137471132 / 133669310°
812.00−451279 / −416500 / −2417051103 / 1320646
913.50−280220 / −252418 / −1496401031 / 1335582
1015.00−109138 / −84273 / −46467915 / 140040610°

At station 0 the keel has risen to the waterline and all four strakes have converged into the stem, so their offsets there are generated from the stem taper rather than tabulated; the code that does it is in calc/sunwake/offsets.py and says so.

Boot seam at z = +130 mm throughout.

Strake widths amidships, measured along the girth: bottom 0.351 m, bilge 0.357 m, upper bilge 0.494 m, topside 1.314 m. The three submerged strakes total 1.20 m, so three of them rip from one 1.22 m sheet — which is why four strakes nests better than the arithmetic suggests.

Stern platform beyond station 10: the keel runs out at 6.5° to a trailing edge at (15.30, −75 mm); platform sole at +350 mm between x 15.04 and 15.28; a reverse transom face at 12° from the sheer at x = 14.82, with moulded side steps in the face.

Stem tip at (−0.30, +1.97).

Next steps#

  1. Owner review of the character drawing — the sprung sheer, the spoon stem, the platforms — and the trunk-lights-over-the-queens question. Those are the two aesthetic gates before the general arrangement.
  2. Naval architect refair on the Rev 0a basis: chine-line fairing against the unrolling check; the chine 2 transom run-out (finding 6); BWL 1.45–1.50 m against the Bahamas draft (finding 2); LCB held at 53.5–54.5 %; forward flare concavity; the transom immersion trade in the 6–10 kt band.
  3. Panel development and unrolling of the four strakes per side, with a strain report per strake showing the flat panel lies within what the specified plywood thickness tolerates — then CNC nesting. See cutting the kit.
  4. Variant CFD: interference at s/L 0.33 (finding 5 is the headline question), four-strake against round bilge at matched hydrostatics, a platform length sweep, and the skeg wake into the propeller plane.
  5. Midship section drawing fixing the vertical datums — wet deck 0.90 m, saloon sole 1.12 m, berth platform 0.70 m — once the trunk decision lands, then the general arrangement.