I've had a lifetime of conversations with Hans-Walter Rix (MPIA) about the point that you could in principle sail with a sailboat with flat sails: Nothing about the curvature of the sails is integral or required by sailing. The curvature helps, but isn't necessary. I have had another lifetime of conversations with Matt Kleban (NYU) about the point that sailing depends on the relative velocity between the air and the water, and this leads to some hilarious physics problems involving sailing on rivers in zero wind (it's possible because a flowing river is moving relative to the dead air).
These worlds collided this weekend because—inspired by a twitter conversation—I finally built a proper ram-pressure model of a flat-sail, flat-keel sailboat and got it all working. It's sweet! It sails beautifully. Much more to say, but question is: Is there a paper to write?
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