Design Requirements
She must look like a proper yacht. She must have clean lines, a proper naval paint scheme, shiny fittings and varnished wood. She should also look sufficiently conventional and luxurious so not to assault the senses and still be perceived as a boat design that is familiar and recognizable.
She must provide accommodation, storage, and transportation for a family. She must be seaworthy enough to sail across oceans, with generous fresh water tanks and plentiful storage space. She should have shallow draft, to float over flooded lands and shoals, into estuaries, and up and down rivers and canals, and a bottom capable to settle upright. She must be beached without suffering hull damage. She must be economically viable to build, to maintain, and to operate.
She must be designed not just for fair weather sailing, but also to survive the typical set of worst-case scenarios. She must be capable of surviving the same set of conditions today’s best cruising sailboats are supposed to endure.
She must be both well insulated and well ventilated, to protect her crew from the weather in any climate and season, both hot and cold. She must contain enough flotation along the sides and the deck, and enough solid ballast along the bottom, to maintain positive buoyancy even when flooded and self-righting even when holed and swamped.
She must be energy efficient. She must have a propulsion system that requires just about zero maintenance, never has to be winterized and runs quietly. This system must recharge itself using all wind and solar energy, shore power, and regenerate energy using its own motor, moved by the propeller.