Yancovitch, I think any fabric permeable enough to shed wind would prove to be too permeable to make a good airfoil. Thus, your ship would not sail forward, but merely drift downwind.

Jimmy James over on modelboatmayhem site, devised some easyish ways to furl sails on his models. Mine is the easiest of all (just remove the yard and it's attached sail), but loses realism in the yard crane. You might check Jimmy James' posts for ideas that you could apply to your next super realistic model (yours are very beautiful). Jimmy passed away last year, sadly, but his posts live on, to the benefit of modelers.

Here is one of his threads, look at post#57:
http://www.modelboatmayhem.co.uk/for...?topic=11955.0

son of a gun....i never thought of that!

When scaling ship's speed, I have found that they look better when you scale time as well. I remember old filmmakers used to use this trick a lot, filming their models at high speed then slowing the film down so it'd look more realistic. The rule of thumb I use is square-root of scale. For example, if your ship is built in 1:144 scale (like my combat models), scale speed is speed * sqrt(144) = speed*12, and scale time is time * sqrt(144) = time*12. So when my battleship fires its guns every 6 seconds, its scale rate of fire is one shot every 72 seconds, which is actually about right for a predreadnought battleship.

I have tried slowing down film of my ships, both electric-powered and sail-powered, but alas my camera only records 30fps and it gets choppy very quickly. If I had a faster camera, though...

Mast at 90 degree, no wind, boring
Mast at 70 degree, some Wind
Mast at 50 degree, fun Wind
Mast at 30 degree, lots of wind
Mast at 0 degree, to much wind
Mast at 180degree start swimming
Mast at 360 degree, got Lucky