AMERICA’S CUP NOTEBOOK : Designs on Winning? Get High-Tech Info

So you want to design a sailboat?

Three experts--John Marshall, Heiner Meldner and Bruce Nelson--explained how to several hundred guests at a recent luncheon thrown by the America’s Cup Organizing Committee in San Diego. They showed slides and talked nautical engineering jargon about stress loads and such involved with the new 75-foot Cup class.

When the lights came back on--blank stares. They had dazzled and baffled just about everyone in the room, leaving them in suspended animation between their chicken Neptune entree and raspberry bash dessert.

But, hey, these are going to be really swell boats.

The first thing you need to build one is a computer, preferably a big one with lots of buttons and lights. For a crew, round up a few friends from MIT, Caltech and NASA. The controls will not have little pictures of headlights or windshield wipers to tell which one to use.

Marshall heads Partnership for America’s Cup Technology (PACT), which deals in the basic stuff that all of the American defense syndicates can use in their design programs, rather than duplicating preliminary research at unnecessary expense. Marshall is a smart fellow, although maybe not as quite as smart as Meldner, a physicist from the Livermore National Laboratory who is working for the America-3 syndicate.

Anyway, PACT has developed what it calls a “velocity prediction program” for the new America’s Cup boats.

In other words, you can throw the design back into the computer and find out how fast your boat should go. You wonder who’s going to win the Cup next year? These guys know.

Next time they won’t even have to build boats, which will save a lot of money. Next time: the Nintendo America’s Cup.

This is the America’s Cup of the ‘90s, with newer, bigger, high-tech boats, created on computers. Scientists at Science Applications International Corp., Grumman and MIT, we are told, have worked out “computational fluid dynamics calculations to develop computer code capabilities for use by the syndicates on their designs.”

Whoa. The winged keel we understood. It made Australia II go faster than Liberty in ’83. That’s all Dennis Conner knew.

But . . . “Computational fluid dynamics calculations?” Are they putting us on?

Meldner said the new America’s Cup class formula has taken boat design into “a no-man’s land” in developing new technology. It certainly did that to the luncheon audience.

Nelson and Marshall helped to design Stars & Stripes ‘87, the best old 12-meter ever, for Conner to win at Fremantle in ’87. Now Nelson says, “Team Dennis Conner is finding it’s tremendously expensive to invest in all the technology to be competitive.”

That’s why Marshall organized PACT.

“We need PACT to pull together the effort to support the defenders,” he said.

Of course, Marshall anticipated there would be more than just two defense syndicates, but PACT carries on with new funding from IBM.

One thing the geniuses hope to learn is how flimsy they can build the boats, because the stronger they build them the heavier--and therefore slower--they’ll be. As they were talking, in fact, the mast was breaking on one of New Zealand’s boats.

Meldner: “As with all racing vehicles, ideally they’ll fall into pieces on the other side of the finish line.”

Finally, the question the world is asking: Will the computers tell them to build boats with winged keels? All we’ve seen so far is boats with long, thin keels with 15-ton lead, torpedo-like bulbs at the bottom, where it will provide the most stability (see fulcrum effect, high school physics 1-A). Sometimes, as the Spaniards found out, the bulbs fall off, well before Meldner’s finish line.

Nelson is cagy. “The 12-meter rules specified a rather shallow draft (nine feet). This class has a deep draft (14 feet), with emphasis on getting the weight low. It’s still too early to tell what the keels will be this time.”

We’ll bet the computer knows.

A Vote for Dennis. Il Moro syndicate executive Gabriele Rafanelli thinks the Italians will ultimately face Dennis Conner for the Cup.

“I’ve sailed with Dennis many times,” Rafanelli was quoted by Lois Fecteau in Soundings. “If Dennis has a half-decent boat he will sail circles around Bill Koch, and I’m afraid (Koch co-skipper) Gary Jobson is not in the same league, either.

“Dennis is Dennis. He is obnoxious. He is rude. But he is a very, very good sailor.”

But Is the Cup Ready for John Madden? The America’s Cup will have on-the-water umpiring for the first time--a big plus that should avert the all-night protest hearings that plagued Fremantle in ’87.

Now Tom Ehman, executive director of the America’s Cup Organizing Committee, says instant replay also will be used by a judge back on shore, studying monitors from as many as eight cameras.

The shore judge will be in constant radio contact with the umpires on the water but only to offer observations from the better vantage points of other boats, helicopters and blimps. Unlike the NFL procedure, he can’t overrule any calls.

Alongside the judge will be a commentator with a Telestrator to illustrate and explain incidents for the viewers.

No, the boats won’t stop while decisions are reviewed.

There are a lot of 7- and 8-year-old girls in Italy named Azzurra.

The reason traces back to 1983 when the Italian boat of that name performed surprisingly well in the America’s Cup at Newport, R.I.

“The interest in an event in Italy is proportionate to how well we do,” explained Monica Paolazzi, a press liaison person for the Il Moro di Venezia syndicate based on Shelter Island. “After ’83 everybody in Italy was keen on sailing and started buying boats and naming daughters after the boat Azzurra.”

Any syndicate that shows up after April 1 will have to wait until September for permission to do any major waterfront construction for a compound in San Diego Bay.

That’s the nesting season of the least tern, an endangered shorebird.