Sailing Rigs
I wanted to make the world's fastest yawl, so I made the aft sail bigger, but apparently that means it's not a yawl anymore! It's a real ketch-22.
I wanted to make the world's fastest yawl, so I made the aft sail bigger, but apparently that means it's not a yawl anymore! It's a real ketch-22.
This comic shows the side profiles of a variety of different sailing boat/ship rigs, starting with six real ones, but then moving mostly into ones imagined by Randall, with varying levels of absurdity. The table below explains each type depicted.
The title text is a pun on Catch-22, a term taken from the novel of the same name for a situation where success is impossible because it requires meeting self-contradictory conditions. For example, the novel introduces the term for a pilot who requests mental evaluation for insanity, hoping to be found not sane enough to fly and thereby escape dangerous missions, but who demonstrates his own sanity by creating the request and thus cannot be declared insane. Per the main panel, a ketch is similar to a yawl but has a larger aft sail, so increasing the aft sail of a yawl effectively turns the yawl into a ketch, effectively making it impossible to build a faster yawl. (This is not technically true, as the distinction between a yawl and ketch is based on whether the aft sail is mounted forward or aft of the rudder post, although a yawl with a large aft sail would probably be difficult to control.)