Here’s another: the hot-rod/car-racing field is CRAMMED with snake-oil, & the best information is sooo shoddily converted into book-form, that is nearly useless.

David Vizard’s books, & the related books on the domain, are important-to-study, but DEAR G-D is there a RIPE market for anybody who wants to convert all that shit-publishing into quality publishing…

That’s a contributing-factor to why the entire internal-combustion-engine aftermarket is mostly snake-oil bullshit, unfortunately.

I bet the entire internal-combustion-engine industry could have made their engines 10% more efficient, average, had they studied what the inventors/racers had published, & used that information competently…

sigh

the same is true for the general-aviation industry, as a whole.

Notice that the 2 absolute innovators in these 2 domains, were Smokey Yunick & Burt Rutan: anarchists who did more research-engineering than … pretty-much the entire rest of the industry.

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IF you want to become competent in sailboat-design, THEN you NEED:

• “The Principles of Yacht Design”, get the most-recent edition of it.
• ALL of Dave Gerr’s books.
• Fossatti’s Aero-Hydrodynamics of Sailing, or whatever that book is called
• probably Nigel Calder’s books, to understand what makes a lifelong sailor value a design-decision
• Tom Cunliffe’s books, to understand the difference between excellent captaining vs “good enough”, & the implications of that, on the design
• a book on windvanes, if you intend to impliment one, on your design ( for cruisers )
• “The Rigger’s Apprentice”, by Brion Toss
• “The Sailmaker’s Apprentice” or something like that, can’t remember, right now…
• the North Sails book on sails/sail-design/sailmaking
• look up the Sharrow propeller, on yt, for power-boats ( annular-box-wing prop, for outboards: no cavitation! )
• Harry Riblett’s book on General Aviation airfoils, available at the Experimental Aviation Association, if you are going to do ANYthing interesting with hydrofoiling ( he nailed the ATR-72 icing problem last-century, & that airfoil’s problem killed an airliner in 2024, with NASA still not admitting the truth about that foil )
• Julia, the programming-language, for doing your math: better than spreadsheets, can use real math symbols, & you aren’t touching any part of the code that you aren’t working-on ( in a spreadsheet, a stray typo can distort the entire sheet, & you can’t find what it is that is skewing everything unless you’re seeing the whole sheet’s equations: it’s the wrong paradigm: error-accumulation, instead of error-eradication. Julia has a learning-track on Exercism, & has a few good books. )

Getting that set of knowledge into one, will save you thousands of wasted dollars, chasing “wild geese”.

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For aircraft-design, I’d say begin with Snorri Gudmundsson’s book, NOT Raymer’s.

( Raymer is careless, & you will save yourself much frustration if you avoid his books. Snorri’s is on its 2nd edition, so I’m presuming it to be the go-to book for the industry, nowadays: I can’t afford it, & may not ever, but I wish I’d got Gudmundsson’s book, instead of Raymers, now )

You’ll need Harry Riblett’s book on airfoils, as mentioned above. https://www.kitplanes.com/the-airfoil-adventures-of-harry-riblett/ Notice that the Bearhawk has his foil on it, and its reputation is awesome.

You’ll need this video-playlist, in order to understand just how AWEFUL the interference-drag is, on normal designs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZhyjYE4Le0&list=PLO-XZZWFTH5ELMG3CECqMPZoEFREgwkPn

( I think it was 67HP & 250mph, in level flight, for one of Mike Arnold’s birds. )

Once these things by Mike Arnold & Harry Riblett sink-in, then the normal designs you see in general-aviation … become unconscionable: all that wasted-opportunity, all the needless drag-inefficiency.

Harry Riblett was using Eppler’s simple software, simple simulations, & nowadays you’d HAVE TO use OpenFOAM to do your simulations, XFoil mis-represents stall-onset, apparently, & XFoil is vastly better than what Riblett was using, years ago.

You NEED to understand both Bernoulli’s principle & the Reynolds number, in aircraft-design.

There are sites with video-training for OpenFOAM: CFD/Computational-Fluid-Dynamics’s complicated, & I’d recommend that.

It is entirely possible to design an aircraft, nowadays, on your own, using X-Plane, OpenFOAM, & the choicest study-materials, & YEARS of thinking on it, until your own unconscious-mind groks that-specific-component in the problem, then get digging on the next one…

Further, IF you take into consideration what Riblett & Arnold gave us, THEN you can do better than what most of the new designs in general-aviation are doing.

There is a video, which I now can’t find, on changing Burt Rutan’s Vari-EZ or Long-EZ aircraft to have blended canards, & it noticeably reduced the drag.

That is exactly the sort of thing that Mike Arnold instinctively understood, & if you begin with that kind of instinct, then you … don’t waste the opportunity that the normal aircraft-designers are enforcing.

You need to consider Prandtl wings, too, as that’s beginning to become significant in modern designs.

All the stuff I’ve realized in both these domains is affects patentability, & therefore I’ll not give you that: I want to be able to create a not-for-profit keiretsu which makes both sailboats & aircraft ( a keiretsu is like Panasonic: an organism made of companies, not a single-company ), someday, & patent-protection’s required to break the for-profit monopoly in both industries.

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Sorry I’m not just giving you a bunch of answers, instead pointing you at competent-learning-means…

but the world really is better when you learn your-own way, & others learn their-own way, & the results are more … exploring-evolution’s-potential.

Both of these domains will take you under a decade to get from beginning-learning to where you’re really knowing-what-you’re-doing enough to become able to begin competently inventing.

Don’t expect to get to that stage in less than 7y, though.

It took me 8, before everything suddenly fell-into-place, & the different fluid-dynamics-interactions fit together, for different kinds of design, etc…

But I’d rather the world have other-people doing it, … than me knowing, but not doing it, & others thinking that university-courses is the only valid way.

LibreTexts.org iirc is also a place with some good information on it, in the aircraft-design space…

Whatever: IF anybody cares to earn competence in either domain, THEN I hope this boosts you into it, more efficiently.

If not, then just ignore this.

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