Word: procyon
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Finally, a group of entrepreneurs has made a dramatic effort to build a boat of the future that is radically different from those of the past, involving a lot less yo heave ho. The fruit of their efforts is the Amoco Procyon, a $1.5 million, 65-ft. luxury vessel, built of space-age materials, that demands one- third the crew of an equivalent-size traditional yacht. The Procyon is currently cruising down the U.S. East Coast in a bid to spark interest in its arsenal of design changes, which add up to the automation of a labor-intensive sport...
...total saving in terms of muscle power and barked knuckles is impressive. Despite its size, two people can rig the sails of the Procyon in about five minutes; normally, readying a boat this large can take half an hour for a crew of eight. Slick aerodynamic design and a hydraulically powered keel let the Procyon sail at speeds of up to 15 knots: roughly 15% faster than a conventionally designed boat of comparable size. Automatic winches furl and unfurl the Procyon's Kevlar mainsail and jib horizontally, at a finger's touch, without human assistance. The unique, sculptured boom eliminates...
...Procyon is self-tacking: as the wind pushes the jib sail in a new direction, its hardware slides along a track located on the deck, forward of the cockpit, without needing any special attention from captain or crew. Underneath it all is a 13,000-lb. winged keel, which can be moved by hydraulic power from a vertical down position to as much as a 25 degrees slant to either side. That and a two-ton water-ballast system greatly improve the vessel's stability...
...Procyon is a one-of-a-kind prototype developed partly with money and materials from the Amoco Chemical Co.; it will be put up for sale when it reaches Fort Lauderdale, its final destination. But its creators are hopeful that many of the innovations it incorporates can be offered on smaller boats with less imposing price tags. "In the future you'll see bipod masts and carbon-fiber construction all over," says Olaf Harken, co-founder of Wisconsin's Harken Yacht Equipment, the world's second largest manufacturer of boat hardware, and a driving force behind the Procyon. "The benefits...
...Astronomer Edmund Halley of comet fame showed that Sirius, Procyon and Arcturus had changed positions−relative to other stars−since Greek times, establishing for the first time that the stars were not fixed in the heavens. By the early 1900s, astronomers had learned that the sun was merely one of billions of stars in a disc-shaped galaxy, or island of stars, then believed by many to constitute the entire universe. In 1920 Harlow Shapley calculated that the galaxy, called the Milky Way, was some 300,000 light years* in diameter, a distance too stupendous for most people...