Talk:3193: Sailing Rigs

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)

Originaly the title text was made after the comic, as an extra joke that is not originally part of the plan. This I have seen Randall say at some point. So I would not expect he came up with the pun and then the made the comic. Of course he could have changed his mind. But there are several other jokes and references in the 18 labels of the boats, so it is not only the catch22 joke anyway. --Kynde (talk) 16:19, 14 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)

Well, all I did was take screenshots of them and then resize them when I actually implemented them. I don't know why you're peeved by the Longsail not being long enough (it's still a different ratio than the other images, and is very clearly longer than the other ships within it), but I've resized the image to make it longer. --DollarStoreBa'al^Converse 15:36, 14 January 2026 (UTC)

Also, I believe this method actually positively affects people's willingness to participate. It makes the way to do this much clearer (and easier) compared to pixel measurements. Plus, how did you measure the pixels? Those were pretty precise measurements you had.--DollarStoreBa'al^Converse 15:43, 14 January 2026 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ @DollarStoreBa'al…yikes? Screenshots and resizing? Those are both methods that can lose fidelity…it's not worth agonizing overmuch, but as a general practice anything that degrades the image quality is something to be avoided (given that these are 1bpp b/w images, such concerns are at their nadir)…I had assumed they were native crops. Re longsail, my point is that Randall's artistic intent is in conflict with automatic scaling and I don't think the images should be scaled independently of each other. I'm not sure how you can assess participation, since I don't know why there would be much more attention to the images now that they are "done" (but the burden of uploading additional images with different crops if someone wanted to change one seems to me a lot higher than changing one number in the wikitext of a template). I can't predict the future, but I can definitely say that it had a substantial negative impact on me (especially to hear it's because of how you interpreted my own comment on the talk page!). I regret that's being expressed here in the text now. To answer your question, I measured the pixels by drawing ruler guides on the master image and reading them off. I don't think the precision speaks to participation in any way (not sure if that's what was meant by "Plus,"). JohnHawkinson (talk) 16:13, 14 January 2026 (UTC)

I really like the table as it is now. I did not see the first version. But the current version looks like what we have done several times before, and that is easy for anyone to understand and edit. I have no idea what the other way is. But I have made tables like this when I was more active. It is not important what the image looks like in the table as you have the full comic above. It is just to make sure you know which boat is being discussed. And people do not read the entire discussion before making changes, I don't. It has become quite long this one. And yes you do not get any notification if someone replies here. If you need to get hold of someone's attention posting on their talk page is the best chance. That is also they way to reach me, the only active admin at the moment. But I'm not very active. But if someone posts om my page I will get an e-mail and then I will read it. I try to make a mention of what I do when I make larger changes, but it can fail. I do hope this doesn't deter you from making contributions another time though! Great you are invested in it. But personally I think this simpler way is the way to go here. --Kynde (talk) 16:35, 14 January 2026 (UTC)