The third sprint consisted of water-testing boat designs, completing the path planner, and making additional headway on other projects. Being November, it is now definitely too cold for any testing on Lake Waban,and we are restricted to testing in the LPB and Babson pools from now up until the Great Thawing that is spring. But we are not deterred, and we continue to make progress despite the attempts of the natural environment to undermine our efforts.
Mechanical
The Mechanical Subteam finally, after many training delays, gained access to Olin’s Large Project Building (LPB — a small building for large projects). The LPB pool has been filled with water, meaning that Mechanical was able to test their Tinypiper prototypes. They created a small experimental rig that could drag each Tinypiper across the pool, which they to qualitatively analyze the hydrodynamic performance of each design. After testing five unique Tinypipers, the Tinypiper with the hull shape most similar to the current CAD assembly for Hawsepiper stuck out as the hull shape with the least drag.