Dart 18

The Dart 18 is a one-design 18-foot (5.5 m) long glassfibre sailing catamaran. It is designed to be sailed by two people and can achieve speeds of up to 20 knots. This is reflected in its Portsmouth Yardstick of 805 and D-PN of 76.3

History

The Dart 18 was designed in 1975 as a One Design Class by Rodney March, who was also responsible for the design of the Olympic Tornado class catamaran. The very first Dart 18, designed and built in Falmouth, Cornwall, is now owned by the National Maritime Museum Cornwall. Up to the present, a number of improvements have been made, but the original concept was preserved though strict class rules. More than 8000 boats have been built up to 2014, which are sailed in more than 16 nations on 4 continents. Since 2012, Windsport International holds the worldwide license to build the Dart 18. The boats are manufactured since 2005 at Collins Fibreglass Plastics in South Africa and in Europe. The World Championship results can be found here.

Design

The hulls of the Dart 18 are similar to most sailing catamarans, but without centreboards. Instead, the lower part of the hulls have skegs typical for a beach catamaran. The hull material is glassfibre. Both hulls are filled with flotation inserts to preserve buoyancy in case of damage. The inside of each hull can be reached through a hatch cover located at the rear of each hull. The boat is assembled by attaching the main and rear beams to the hulls with spring-loaded retaining clips, and lacing the trampoline to the beams and hulls. The two rudders are removable without tools, retract on impact with the beach, and can be locked in the up position.

Dart

Dart may refer to:

Dart or DART may also refer to:

Computing

Fiction

Organisations

Dart (comics)

Dart (Jill August) is a fictional Image Comics superhero. Created by Erik Larsen, she first appeared in 1992, in Savage Dragon #2 (ongoing series).

Publication history

Dart has appeared in numerous issues of Savage Dragon as a supporting character, as well as being a major character in the Freak Force series and subsequent mini-series. In February 1996, she received her own eponymous three-issue limited series, written by Julie Ditrich and Bruce Love with artwork by Jozef Szekeres.

Fictional character biography

Jill August was born on August 12, 1969, in Detroit, Michigan. She grew up timid and demoralized, witnessing her mother's constant spousal abuse at the hands of her father, and her friends' abuse at the hands of a cruel coach at school. She witnessed her father beat her mother to death, a crime for which he was sentenced to life in prison, effectively leaving Jill an orphan.

As a teenager, Jill saw a female friend being assaulted by several men in a bar in Detroit. Attempting to intervene, she fell against a dartboard hung on the barroom wall, and the men began to attack her as well. Instinctively, she used the darts to defend herself, throwing them at her attackers with astonishing accuracy, seriously injuring all of them. She subsequently decided to use this newly discovered skill to both help others and manage her feelings of helplessness (and the rage that comes with those feelings).

Dart (missile)

Darts are missile weapons, designed to fly such that a sharp, often weighted point will strike first. They can be distinguished from javelins by fletching (i.e., feathers on the tail) and a shaft that is shorter and/or more flexible, and from arrows by the fact that they are not of the right length to use with a normal bow.

The term has been used to describe an extremely wide variety of projectiles, from heavy spear-like ammunition for siege engines or atlatls to tiny poisoned needles for use in blowguns.

Plumbatae or martiobarbuli

Plumbatae or martiobarbuli were lead-weighted darts carried by infantrymen in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The first examples seem to have been carried by the Ancient Greeks from about 500 B.C. onwards, but the best-known users were the late Roman and Byzantine armies. The best written source for these tactical weapons is Vegetius's treatise known as De Re Militari (1.17):

Prehistory

Some of the earliest evidence of advanced tool use includes remnants of an early type of dart, which can be considered the ancestor of arrows as well as bows (see Operation). Reconstructions of this system have a range of over one hundred metres (yards) and can penetrate several centimetres of oak. This technology was used worldwide from the Upper Palaeolithic (late Solutrean, c. 18,000-16,000 BC) until the development of archery made it obsolete (see Replacement).