A University of New South Wales student submitted this design and won the James Dyson Award this year. Sounds like an idea that might should come to production. read more »

Lots of boat builders and designers will use models in a variety of ways. Interior layout is probably the most common, or even just getting an idea of the shape and look of a craft before building in full scale.

Often somebody will decide to build a model and see how it performs. Be careful here. There are lots of issues when scaling something down and then expecting it to perform in a non-scaled physical world. The dynamics of water don't change just because the hull got smaller. The strength of materials is not linear, nor is the weight. read more »

Royal Caribbean has an interesting site started showing various "behind the scene" aspects of the design, building and bringing to life of one of their new cruise ships.

If you are interested in ships, this might be worth checking out. A bit larger scale than my build :-)

Some of the guys from a couple of the mailing lists (PuP and Trawlers and Trawlering) have put a wiki page up to foster discussion of building the "perfect passagemaker". I don't know that it has hit "critical mass" to get a lot of discussion going, but certainly worth a look, and I'm sure they would love additional input. read more »