3193: Sailing Rigs

Sailing Rigs

|< < Prev #3193 (January 12, 2026)

Title text: I wanted to make the world's fastest yawl, so I made the aft sail bigger, but apparently that means it's not a yawl anymore! It's a real ketch-22.

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Explanation

This is one of 60 incomplete explanations: This page was created by the birds flying in my kite. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

This comic shows the side profiles of a variety of different sailing boat/ship rigs, not all of which are real. The first six which are listed are real, as well as the tenth, but none of the others are. A Flettner rotor (shown in the tenth one) is a cylinder with disc end plates which is spun along its long axis, generating force at a right angle to the direction of the wind.

• Lateen: a single triangular sail.
• Bermuda rigged sloop: a front and rear triangular sail share a mast.
• Ketch: two triangular sails as above, with an additional triangular sail on a second rear mast.
• Gaff rigged sloop: front triangular sail shares mast with rear quadrilateral sail.
• Yawl: two triangular sails share front mast and a much smaller aft mast holds a small aft.
• Schooner: two triangular front sails share foreward mast with quadrilateral center sail. An aft mast supports a quadrilateral aft sail.
• Ketch-rigged gaff: The first fictional rig. Resembles a gaff, with the aft sail reduced and two triangular sails mounted above. The resulting shape resembles a vertical ketch.
• Kloop-rigged sketch: A mixture of the names of ketch and sloop, poking fun at the unfamiliar names of some rigs.
• Bunkbed rig: A gaff-rigged sloop is mounted on top of a second hull.
• Flettner rig: A single rectangular sail.
• Oops, all spinnakers: three masts each with a sail only attached to the top.
• Keel rig: three sales in a ketch arrangement, but mounted to the keel, which would typically put the **sails underwater**.
• Kite rig: all sails are replaced by two groups of kites, each tied to the mast with an independent line.
• Longsail rig: bermuda rigged sloop with the aft sail extending ~5 times as far back, well beyond the end of the hull.
• Deckhand obliterator: all sails replaced by an anchor that swings around the mast on a chain, similar to tetherball. Any deckhands (crew) on the deck could be knocked off or fatally hurt if the anchor passes through their space.
• Offset rig: gaff rigged sloop sails are mounted on a mast that is offset (forward) from the hull via an underwater extension of the keel.
• Mastless rig: a single sail is attached where the mast would normally be mounted, flapping around freely. This provides much less propulsion or steering.
• Unclassifiable chaos rig: includes elements of the schooner, yawl, lateen, and possibly others.

The title text is a pun on a Catch-22, a no-win situation in which the thing needed to succeed would cause it not to succeed or not to be necessary. For instance, "the only way to qualify for a loan is to prove to the bank that you do not need a loan." Per the main panel, a ketch is similar to a yawl but has a larger aft sail, so increasing the aft sail of a yawl effectively turns the yawl into a ketch.

Transcript

This is one of 37 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

[The comic contains views from the side of boats, each with a different sailing rig. All boats are oriented to the left of the comic.]

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Discussion

Here before all the "here im first" comments TheTrainsKid (talk) 05:06, 13 January 2026 (UTC)

I can't help but notice that he forgot about cutters. PDesbeginner (talk) 05:07, 13 January 2026 (UTC)

 :D Qwertyuiopfromdefly (talk) 05:15, 13 January 2026 (UTC)

Flettner Rig may refer to https://xkcd.com/3119/ 73.225.91.80 06:19, 13 January 2026 (UTC)

Yes, but also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flettner_rotor 130.76.187.47 12:57, 13 January 2026 (UTC)

I see Randall has taken up a new hobby :D 152.115.135.109 08:21, 13 January 2026 (UTC)

Perhaps. I presume that the entire comic is in service to the pun in the title text. Philhower (talk) 13:44, 13 January 2026 (UTC)

Wikipedia does have a kite rig web page. That's a real thing, but usually not as pretty as here. And I suppose you could do helium balloons. Robert Carnegie [email protected] 85.115.54.203 11:46, 13 January 2026 (UTC)

Why is this page (alone of all the comics, as far as I've seen) mirrored? The comic image, text, angle of the italics, etc. are all reversed on both the comic page and the front page. Stock Safari on iOS 16.7.12. D5xtgr (talk) 14:03, 13 January 2026 (UTC)

"Troll revision". Got it, mystery solved. Though I'm a bit surprised that raw styling like that's allowed, not just wiki markup. D5xtgr (talk) 14:09, 13 January 2026 (UTC)

I remember looking through all kinds of rig-types when trying to describe (and/or explain) a prior comic with a particular sailing ship design on it (some time ago, not sure which one). Might well be that Randall's been looking at the same page as I did. ;) 92.23.2.208 14:44, 13 January 2026 (UTC)

The offset rig one could be a reference to speed record sailboats. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestas_Sailrocket) For torque reasons, they have the mast mounted on a horizontal boom and offset far off the side of the boat. Though on the other hand, speed record boats have this boom above the water, and only have single sails. 2600:4040:2C96:4700:953D:B3CC:B3DB:2C2E 15:19, 13 January 2026 (UTC)

That looks to me more like a form of catamaran (or partly-inline trimarang).

The definition of yawl is wrong. What matters is not position of mizzen relative to rudder post, but to water line. Ketches often have the mizzen mast behind the rudder.

There is no hard-and-fast definition of ketch vs yawl, really it goes by how the boat handles. Having said that, the usual definition, and most commonly quoted, is whether the mizzen mast is fore or aft of the rudder post... and in most cases this definition works. Martin (talk) 22:15, 13 January 2026 (UTC)

Bunkbed rig could also be reference to a Hydrofoil, the idea that the boat moves so fast it climbs out of the water. 198.180.154.20 15:48, 13 January 2026 (UTC)

The "OOPS, ALL SPINNAKERS" could be made to work (although only sailing downwind, and only up to the speed of the airflow) by using spinnakers increasingly tightly woven so that the upwind ones would let pass most of the airflow with the subsequent ones being increasingly tightly woven, thus minimalizing the loss of efficiency due to the escape of airflow around the edges of each spinnaker. Such a setup could potentially allow to maximize the use of the airflow force when sailing directly downwind, although the increase in complexity and wheight would likely lead to an overall loss of efficiency compared to a single, well-designed spinnaker. In any case the spinnaker (basically a parachute on a mast) is only designed to add a little extra boost when sailing downwind in a strong wind for a relatively long time (when the main sails can't catch much wind; in this configuration the main sail(s) are typically angled at a very wide angle against the airflow which is very suboptimal for a "foil" sail), in all other cases the foil-like sails are much more efficient and do allow to sail faster than the wind, which the spinnaker can't achieve, by design. 2001:861:3F07:A020:D17C:74A0:94EF:9DAD 21:30, 13 January 2026 (UTC)

"Real: No" should probably be "Real: Not as of January 13, 2026." Because at least for a few of those, someone out there will see the comic and say "Hmm, that's an interesting idea" and make it happen. 64.201.132.210 22:05, 13 January 2026 (UTC)

The explanation for Yawl contains an incorrect definition of fore-and-aft rigging. It says a mast has two sails "One in front of the mast and one behind, known as fore-and-aft rigging" but that is not what fore-and-aft rigging means. Even a single sail can be fore-and-aft rigged, which means it is rigged to a boom and/or the centreline of the boat. This is different from square-rigged, which means rigged to a spar which goes across the boat from one side to the other (at right angles to the centreline). Martin (talk) 22:26, 13 January 2026 (UTC)

Cropped images

I brought over the Template:CSS image crop from enwiki and added cropped images to the table and…it doesn't look quite as good as I had hoped. Perhaps they need to be scaled down. Still, my patience for finding all the boundaries and entering them is at an end, so … perhaps someone else can make it look better without doing a lot of work. Not sure. good luck. (I forget how this was done in prior explanations, ugh. Maybe in a better way. I forgot to look before doing this work.) JohnHawkinson (talk) 15:29, 13 January 2026 (UTC)

I went through the very-redlinking documentation part and stripped out (or commented out) various things that did not 'translate well' on this site due to not having the requisite support templates. (And trivially list-formatted the parameter explanations.) (I didn't stop it from giving itself the redlinked category used to track invalid uses of the template, checking the documented examples could reveal which does that... assuming we don't want to just remove that check-and-categorisation from the 'working' template codeanyway.) If anyone cares to look at the form of the code that has so much more transcluded template-formatting, it's the second edit-version of the page that you need to go through and consider what can be (and needs to be) re-added in.

As to how we've done it before, it's generally done by salami-slicing the image (from the big image on this or the original site) and then manually uploading those mini fragments as images in their own right to use in support (see, e.g. how 730: Circuit Diagram has done it). 92.23.2.208 20:04, 13 January 2026 (UTC)

Thanks, yes, I thought about fixing up the template documentation and decided it just was not worth the effort, but happy to have you have done it. I do think using "sprites" from the main image works better than uploading the cross product of rows and columns as separate files. Thanks for the 730 reference, all I could remember was 1928: Seven Years where I solved a different but related problem in a different way (overlay numbering sub-panels while applying an alpha channel and referencing those numbers as callouts), though curiously we did not continue it for 2386: Ten Years or 3172: Fifteen Years. Maybe there should be a Category:Image-based explanation markup solutions to put these all in. I am a little bit joking, but more serious than not.

Also, we could definitely rewrite this template so it could be used in a less verbose way with numbered parameter fields and maybe a scaling factor. Or, for that matter, to take a list of intersection points and to return the nth sub-image given those corner points. But, of course, I went with what seemed the easiest lift at the time. JohnHawkinson (talk) 20:42, 13 January 2026 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Apparnetly @DollarStoreBa'al disagrees first. I wish they had said something. JohnHawkinson (talk) 21:49, 13 January 2026 (UTC)
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