2007-04-15 06:41:50 UTC
As you can see I'm really long to write answer too... I've been abroad for a while (come back home a few days ago) and it was impossible to me to write you. Sorry.
About your questions:
KG is the distance of the centre of mass of the COMPLETE boat. In the boat I wrote the vpp for initially, it coincided with the centre of buoyancy of the hull, so that it can even be above the highest part of the keel; not to much i hope... the boat would be upside down most of his life :-)
I guess it could be more than 1.5 metres, unless you have a very heavy bulb. You are supposed to include in it sails masts etc. too. Of course their neiglability (did I write it correctly?) depends on their weight and on how tall high their centre of mass are.
For what it concerne the centre of buoyancy of the keel, ti may coincide or not with the centre of mass. Most correctly, it's the centre of volume. Imagine you have an empty keel's wing and an heavy bulb. The centre of mass would be lower than the center of volume (ie the centre of buoyancy), as the mass is concentreted in the lowest part. That is why they may not be the same point.
I'm triyng to rewrite gvpp in c++ so that it may be compiled without the MCR (quite a heavy file to download compared with the few KB of gvpp). Hope to manage to do that!
One warning: there is an error in the calculation if Ri if provided via personal input file, so that it won't work in some cases. I'm working on it too!
Hope to be usefull
Bye
Gianluca
