Das Prauw - The Proa of the Future

05 July 2021     Editor    3 Comments.

GALLERY | Click images to enlarge

This month’s Woodenboat magazine has a nice article about Robbert Das, the Dutch illustrator and futurist. Naturally, they only show his great 3D cutaway drawings of old wooden boats, but holy smokes! A little googling and you come up with the other stuff!

The twin brothers Rudolf and Robbert Das had a long career as technical illustrators, architectural designers, authors and futurologists. I found a thread here about some of their fantastic aircraft drawings, including this ekranoplan sized five-deck airliner and a hypersonic transport.

The Robbert Das Bio site has a gallery of his nautical work that includes some wild multihulls along with all the classic yachts, and even a few proas! The first is a streamlined “one-way-proa”, and the other is this yellow hydrofoil labeled: Prauw, ontwerp 70e jaren, ongesigneerd (Proa, design 1970’s, unsigned).

And that would’ve been that, except that I’ve recently downloaded Rhino 7 3D, which now includes subD modeling tools. I won’t bore you with how cool subD is, but it IS, and this boat looked fairly “subD-ish” to me, so I decided to subDo* the Robbert Das proa in Rhino.

The fuzzy quality of the art makes it difficult to see the details, so a lot is open to interpretation. Especially since I don’t have the translation to the various numbered elements called out. Something to remember about other curator’s work, I suppose. I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to make it perfectly detailed and accurate. Accurate output of fuzzy input is problematic at best.

The hydrofoils are obviously T-foils and I guess the ride-height is adjusted by the fore and aft devices at waterline, perhaps by pushrod control that is covered with the fairings at either end. Above each foil, fore and aft, are maybe antenna with dashed arrow lines and the number 10. Foil area is way too small, but we are archivists here.

The beams are raised above a long and slender oval section hull by a pylon that strongly resembles a submarine conning tower. Curved arrows labeled 7 might represent air flow, and the idea that the pylon contributes to aerodynamic sail power. The beams themselves have enough angles and ovals drawn over them to make Da Vinci proud. I have no idea what they mean.

The red ama is a stepped planing shape, the foil beneath it has an elevator, and and it looks to have the “pushrod fairing” on the front side. The ama is not double-ended, which indicates the whole shebang pivots 180° for every shunt. The transom of the ama suggests a fluted shape to the hull bottom. There are some fuzzy blobs on the ama’s deck, which I am interpreting to be cockpit canopies. There is no indication of crew’s quarters or even scale in the drawing.

Above the ama there is some kind of tube with an arrow pointing into it, signifying? I know… jet power!

The rig is really not worth mentioning since there is so little of it visible.

With the advantage of 50 years of hindsight, it is easy to see many errors in the concept, and I admit that it resembles a few of my own early proa design efforts. Predicting the future is tricky business, but designers can’t help ourselves. Thank you Robbert Das, for your take on the proa.

*See what I did there?

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