What travels faster than a nuclear submarine, Usain Bolt on a good day, or a dolphin? What’s the same length as a jumbo jet, but is built with aluminium three times as thick?
The answer is Galactica Star, a 65 metre Heesen that has changed the rules of yacht design.
What makes this yacht revolutionary is the shape of its hull. Galactica Star boasts the world’s first Fast Displacement Hull Form (FDHF), a hull so fast and fuel efficient that during tank-testing at the Wolfson facility in Southhampton, the results were so spectacular that they assumed there’d been a mistake, and ran the tests again.
Perry van Oossanen knew that it wasn’t a mistake. The Fast Displacement Hull Form was born out of a bet between Perry and his colleagues at Van Oossanen Naval Architects. ‘We started with a blank sheet of paper, and when our first results produced over 20% less resistance compared with a chine hull, I realised straight away that we were onto something.’ Over 50 million computer calculations and tests later, the theory was proved, and the design awards are rolling in.
What they were onto, quite simply, was the most efficient displacement hull design that had ever been tested, a yacht which performs 30% more efficiently over the 15-30 knot range. With a maximum speed of 28.8 knots, this thing is both fast and significantly more efficient, something few expected from a yard so well known for its performance aluminium yachts.
Read more here: Galactica Star: Changing the Rules of Yacht Design