Microship Status Reports

It has been a month and a half since my last update… and believe it or not, this is my first free moment to sit down and write. We are now halfway through the lab-relocation — we’ve moved out, but don’t know what we’re moving INTO just yet. Ahh, the nomadic life. (Photo above: Michael…

This will be a quick update, folks — we’re on the eve of departure for a week-long cruise around Catalina with our friends Lonnie and Sarah in a Catalina 27 monomaran. True to form, we have not yet begun to pack… tomorrow will be devoted to provisioning and putting out all the fires I can…

The month since our last update has been a frenzy of control system design, casting about for lab space, publishing projects, Web site refinement, ongoing nautical research, and even a tiny bit of play. I think we’ve visited the boat, sitting bored in a storage yard just off campus, about twice… but Tuesday morning is…

A huge event took place in 1995 — the abrupt transition to Microship 3.0. I had already abandoned the original kayak-based system and its variants, and a Puget Sound adventure on a small commercial trimaran (Fulmar) revealed many deficiencies that called for a larger boat. This article was posted to my broad Nomadness distribution list,…

This was the beginning of “Phase 3” of the Microship project. This was kind of insane, but an amazing opportunity presented itself and I couldn’t resist. We luck into a great deal on a piece of multihull history, a folding 30-footer that predates the Corsair F-31 (though it’s a bare hull). We zoom to Seattle…

OK, let’s lay it out analytically. Cat versus tri? Tri looks most sensible for lots of reasons, and we target the 30-foot range at $15K. Build versus buy? We don’t want to be boatbuilders. Hoping to conjure something with a clear enough spec, we lay out a full set of requirements… The cartoon above, based…

Hmmm, so do we build a catamaran? Armed with study plans, we consider this…. while the video turret starts to work, a simple subset of pressure control seems within range, the manpacks practically dance under the tutelage of their team, and we proceed with general hackage. But what to float it all? The delightful image…

In all my years of system engineering and designing strange contraptions, I have never encountered such a plethora of trade-offs as I am finding in the selection of a boat. Weight, internal space, seaworthiness, appearance, solar surface, comfort, trailerability, hackability, speed… all these and more conflict in ways that make the old gain-bandwidth and freedom-security…

I just spent the weekend making a brief airborne jaunt to San Antonio, Texas to visit Charlie Mayer and go sailing on Canyon Lake aboard his Stiletto 27. This issue of the Microship Status Report is devoted to my first observations about the boat, thoughts on a few bizarre but essential mechanical hacks, and the…