3193: Sailing Rigs

Sailing Rigs

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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.

Type	Image	Real?	Description	Explanation
Lateen		Yes	A single triangular sail.	The triangular sail was affixed to a long yard or crossbar, mounted at its middle to the top of the mast and angled to extend aft far above the mast and forward down nearly to the deck. The sail, its free corner secured near the stern, was capable of taking the wind on either side, and, by enabling the vessel to tack into the wind, the lateen immensely increased the potential of the sailing ship. [1]
Bermuda rigged sloop		Yes	A front and rear triangular sail share a mast.	Sloop
Ketch		Yes	A sailboat with two masts, where the main mast is taller than the mizzen (or aft mast), and the mizzen is forward of the rudder post	Similar to a Yawl
Gaff rigged sloop		Yes	A front triangular sail shares mast with rear quadrilateral sail.	A sloop is a sailboat with one mast, typically with two sails mounted on the mast, one ahead and one behind. A Gaff Rig is a sailing rig where one sail is four-sided and controlled by a spar (the gaff) at its top, which is hoisted at an angle to the mast. [2]
Yawl		Yes	Two triangular sails share a front mast, and a much smaller aft mast holds a small aft sail.	A Yawl is sailboat with two masts, where the main mast has two sails (One in front of the mast and one behind, known as fore-and-aft rigging, and the mizzen mast is mounted aft of the rudder post, leading the mizzen sail to typically be small. Similar to a Ketch.
Schooner		Yes	A sailboat with two or more masts, where all have fore-and-aft rigging, and where the foremast is typically smaller than the main mast
Ketch-rigged gaff		No	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		No	Four or five sails mounted in a nonsensical configuration, with elements from the schooner, ketch, and gaff	A mixture of the names of ketch and sloop, poking fun at the unfamiliar and odd-sounding names of some rigs. Adding to the absurdity, the kloop-rigged sketch is neither a sloop nor a ketch. However it is technically a sketch, as "sketch" can mean "drawing"
Bunkbed rig		No	A gaff-rigged sloop mounted on top of a second hull.	The name refers to a bunkbed, where a bed is mounted directly above another, and applies this idea to a ship, mounting a hull directly above another. While boats with multiple hulls do exist, these are always mounted side-by-side to guarentee stability. Mounting a hull above another would be a terrible idea, as the upper hull would be ineffective when raised above the water, the lower hull might become submerged and sink, and such a tall boat would be unstable causing it to fall over. The comic is funny due to this absurdity, due to boat's obivously extreme design being so far outside what someone would expect a boat to look like
Flettner rig		Yes, though not typically called a rig	The rectangular outline of a cylinder with motion lines around it, indicating a Flettner rotor	A Flettner rotor is a right circular cylinder with disc end plates which is spun along its long axis. As air passes across it the Magnus effect causes an aerodynamic lift force to be generated in the direction perpendicular to both the long axis and the direction of airflow. In a rotor ship, the rotors stand vertically and lift is generated at right angles to the wind, to drive the ship forwards. Flettner rotors were previously mentioned in 3119
Oops, all spinnakers		No	Three masts each with a sail billowing in front	A spinnaker is a real type of sail, where a boat is propelled by a large sail directly pulled by the wind, similar in principle to a parachute. However, "Oops, all spinnakers" is not real, as spinnakers are only practical for smaller craft, and if multiple spinnakers are mounted in a row the earlier ones may disrupt the airflow to the later ones[citation needed]. It does not appear that there are any real boats propelled by more than one spinnaker.[citation needed] The name of the rig is a reference to the Cap'n Crunch cereal type that became a meme, Oops! All Berries, which has also been referenced in 2256 and 2719.
Keel rig		No	Three sails in a ketch arrangement, but mounted to the keel, which would typically put the sails underwater.	The book Heaven, by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, features an aquatic protagonist who is introduced as sailing a surface-craft with underwater-'sails' (and above-water 'keel'), due to the switched nature of his usual environment.
Kite rig		Kind of	All sails are replaced by two groups of kites, each tied to the mast with their own independent line.	A kite rig is a real thing, where a kite is deployed from a boat or ship to catch the wind and pull the vessel along. This rigging is used in various types of vessel, most commonly kite surfing, but occasionally other vessels too, up to trials with cargo ships [3]. However, the real kite riggings typically use one large kite optimised for catching the wind, rather than many small kites optimised for flying (as depicted) which would likely get tangled and not pull much on the ship.
Longsail rig		No	A bermuda rigged sloop with the aft sail extending ~5 times as far back, well beyond the end of the hull.	While not technically impossible, such a long sail would likely be suceptiple to damage from the wind, as well as potentially making it hard to control the boat. This design could be a reference to "long-tail bikes" [4], a type of cargo bicycle useful for hauling heavy or voluminous charges at the cost of higher weight and reduced manoeuvrability.
Deckhand obliterator		No	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		No	Gaff rigged sloop sails are mounted on a mast that is offset (forward) from the hull via an underwater extension of the keel.	The extreme mechanical advantage of the sail, potentially combined with the uneven weight, would make this rigging hard if not impossible to control. There are in fact sail configurations called offset rigs but they aren't like the one shown here.
Mastless rig		Kind of	A single sail is directly to the hull of the boat, without any mast holding it in the wind.	As depicted the sail would provide little to no useful propulsion, as it would not be high enough to effective catch the wind. However ships do exist without sails, such as ships not powered by wind[citation needed], or more rarely inflatable sails (e.g. [5]), which use air rather than a mast for rigidity. While not intentional, it is conceivable that the drawing depicts an inflatable sail in its deflated state.
Unclassifiable chaos rig		Arguably	Includes elements of the schooner, yawl, lateen, and possibly others.	While this specific rig is almost certainly fictional, there are many ways to rig a ship, some of which are difficult to classify.

The title text is a pun on the term Catch-22, which is a term (taken from the novel of the same name) for a situation where success is impossible because it requires meeting contradictory conditions. For example, in the novel, the term was used by military pilots who qualified to be released from combat duty, but were ordered to fly additional missions, and were told that disobeying those orders was grounds to have their releases revoked, which would require them to fly additional missions anyway.

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, effectively making it impossible to build a faster yawl. However this is not technically true, as the distinction between a yawl and ketch is based on whether the aft sail is mounted forward or aft of the rudder post, although a yawl with a large aft sail may be difficult to control.^{[actual citation needed]}

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.]

• 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 [Resembles a gaff, with the aft sail reduced and two triangular sails mounted above. The resulting shape resembles a vertical ketch]
• Kloop-rigged sketch: [Includes elements of ketch and sloop]
• Bunkbed rig [A gaff-rigged sloop is mounted on top of a second hull]
• Flettner rig [The rectangular outline of a cylinder with motion lines around it]
• Oops, all spinnakers [three masts each with a sail only attached to the top]
• Keel rig [three sails in a ketch arrangement, but mounted to the keel]
• 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]
• 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]
• Unclassifiable chaos rig [includes elements of the schooner, yawl, lateen, and possibly others]

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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). 92.23.2.208 (talk) 20:04, 13 January 2026 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Are you sure it isn't a boomarang? 82.13.184.33 09:54, 14 January 2026 (UTC)

You're probably thinking of a boo!meringue, a surprising way to use egg-whites. 82.132.238.61 14:12, 14 January 2026 (UTC)

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. 46.114.57.23 (talk) 15:23, 13 January 2026 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

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)

The Offset Rig would work downwind. But it would *only* work downwind because the center of effort is so far forward of the center of lateral resistance. Martin (talk) 23:33, 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)

My bad. Just noticed that somebody wanted to resize easier, and so I did that. By the way, I don't believe this site can do pings (I certainly didn't get one). Also thought it would be easier to modify the images by just going the traditional way instead of using CSS.--DollarStoreBa'al^Converse 00:50, 14 January 2026 (UTC)

Where/with whom was the resizing discussion, please? As for pings, yes, I guess I expect you to read the talk page. Also, please use an edit summary, especially if you are going to undo someone else's hard and innovative work! JohnHawkinson (talk) 08:06, 14 January 2026 (UTC)

Could be refering to your above "Perhaps they need to be scaled down." comment?

And the wiki principle in use here is that if someone sees merit in completely overhauling any page, for whatever reason, then they can do. As you added a completely new-to-this-site template for your idea of how to do it. Which was interesting, and may be useful in the future as well, but might have used a bit more review along the way. This doesn't stop someone else reversing or rechanging what another person did for similarly imagined good reasons, and it only becomes a problem if it's done with bad intent and/or becomes a battle between two mutually exclusive ideologies. Summaries are useful, of course, but some changes may also be fairly self-evident. 82.132.238.61 14:12, 14 January 2026 (UTC)

82.132.238.61, your speculative response here is unhelpful. I asked @DollarStoreBa'al why they did what they did, I am not interested in guesses from others about it, which I think also make it harder to get the answer I was seeking (hence the strength of this response now). I was careful not to allege some of the things you are responding to. And as for whether the changes were self-evident, that is not responsive to the issue of summaries — the point of summaries is to make it manageable to review changes by looking at the history or the notification emails without having to individually review each and every change — unless you are going to review the diffs, either en masse or individually, then the self-evidentiary nature of them is irrelevant. Thank you. I apologize that I sound annoyed.

JohnHawkinson (talk) 14:24, 14 January 2026 (UTC)

"…it doesn't look quite as good as I had hoped. Perhaps they need to be scaled down"

-JohnHawkinson

--DollarStoreBa'al^Converse 14:28, 14 January 2026 (UTC)

Also, don't really see the whole point of introducing an entire new system to do something we could already do. --DollarStoreBa'al^Converse 14:30, 14 January 2026 (UTC)

@DollarStoreBa'al I don't know what method you used to guillotine the image, but I found it substantially faster and more efficient to divide up the images by coordinates than to create 18 individual images based on my experience doing that in the past. The individual image choice also results in different scaling factors for different images, which has its pros and cons — I don't think it's great, though. It means, for instance, the Longsail Rig is squeezed down to the same width of other images and no longer appears as "long." I'd encourage you in the future to think carefully about undoing without discussion another person's work to address what you perceive to be that person's perception that it could be improved. That kind of thing has an effect on people's willingness to contribute and participate. Thanks. JohnHawkinson (talk) 14:53, 14 January 2026 (UTC)
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