"DSK" wrote

Oh, I dunno, probably a lot of designers spend at least a little bit
of time on stuff like that.


Nope. There are other design aspects where the designer is concerned
with wind speed but not when determining rig strength. (I muddied the
waters a bit by saying "force" instead of "speed" farther up the
thread.

If you were designing an exhibit boat fixed in a concrete berth on
land, you would have to figure out the maximum wind speed likely to
occur and then design the rig to withstand that. A boat in the water
heels. No amount of wind can put a greater force on the rig than that
which would heel the boat to the peak of the righting arm curve. You
resolve that back to a corresponding load to design the rig. That
does give you a force that can be converted to wind speed. However,
to get the wind speed that would be measured, you have to first divide
by the Cosine squared of the heel angle to account for the wind
blowing horizontally and not coming down perpendicular to the sails.

When determining sail plan or hull characteristics, the designer will
ponder wind speeds in order to produce a boat that will carry its full
sail plan at optimum heel in a specified wind velocity. The design
question is not, how much wind the rig should withstand but how much
strength is required to match the loads which are determined by the
hull's stability.

This is all a complicated way of agreeing (which is what I was trying
to do in my reply to your post) with your statement that it's silly to
talk about the rig loads of a 150% Genoa in a 35 knot wind.

--

Roger Long