Thanks for all the suggestions.

You can get more power from the lower body (the muscles are larger) but
for the *same* amount of power the upper body puts more strain on the
heart. That's what I read while researching heart disease.

I have worked before with hull resistance figures for canoes and kayaks.
You can get a pretty good estimate of the horpower required to move a hull
at a certain speed. Non-athlete paddlers can sustain about 1/20 of a
horsepower. It's also easy to calculate the amount of water pumped from
the size of the cylinder and the rate of pumping. It's possible to convert
the amount of foot pressure on the pump into the speed of the water
leaving the pump. I should find out about the efficiency of water pump
propulsion. In one book I was lookign at last night it says the shape of
the outlet nozzel is important. I once estimated the energy comsumption
efficiency of paddling a canoe at about 13% (it's on my website under
"Boats").

I agree with one poster that innovation is the fun part about designing
and bulding boats. But I'm not crazy about the building part,
time-consuming messy physical work costing money, so I try to do as many
calculations as possible before starting to build, even though trying to
figure out the formulae sometimes drives me crazy.

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
William R Watt National Capital FreeNet Ottawa's free community network
homepage: www.ncf.ca/~ag384/top.htm
warning: non-FreeNet email must have "notspam" in subject or it's returned