New reply from Todd Wasson
To add a bit more: In the first release of this, the only thing you can adjust on the propeller will be the pitch. You can’t change the diameter or number of blades because it doesn’t necessarily respond correctly to that because of the simple “one triangle per blade” discussed earlier. The effect on propeller slip and at least a couple of efficiency values are too great, just to name a couple things. I wanted to have diameter, number of blades, and possibly rake in there too, but the response to changes in those doesn’t match up well enough with reality to include it. The response would be misleading and I don’t want that, I’d like this sim to be educational and useful to boaters. It’s easy to end up with almost 0 propeller slip for instance. Some effects on the propeller because of its current simplicity are maybe even the opposite of reality, so I didn’t want to include those until the model is improved.
However, changing pitch works pretty well once it’s tuned on one size propeller with a certain number of blades (4 in this case), and pitch has really got to be in there if you can design your own boats of course. That’s the bare minimum really. Right now you can go from 19 to 38 or 40 inches pitch, I think. I forget exactly, but it’s easy to change later if people want a wider range for whatever reason.
So again, after release when I can gauge how sales might be, one of the first things I’ll want to do is update the propeller to something much better with all those other parameters to play with too. I’m curious what rake and cup do. What better way than to try it and actually drive the thing? That’d be cool and I’d like that very much.
My hope is that this will indeed be used to design real boats someday, but I don’t want to advertise as such because I’m not sure if it’s good enough for that, and of course liability issues. I don’t want anybody to hurt themself or waste money and time building something that doesn’t actually work in reality as well as it does in the sim.
http://www.speedboatsim.com/main-forum/other-boats
Original Post by jackwilliam
other boats?
i know that this game is in a very early stage, do you ever plan on adding other boats?