Research · White paper
A measurement-grounded taxonomy for the global ORC fleet. Built on 9,500+ certified boats. The structural map underneath every conversation about how offshore boats differ.
Photography: FleetEdge™ / SailrScience archive.
The Multi-Dimensional Performance Archetype Engine (MPAE) is SailrScience's classification system for offshore racing yachts. It organizes the global fleet into physically meaningful design families using naval-architecture inputs — not race results.
The clusters are discovered, not designed. Eleven of them. They were not chosen top-down; they emerged from the measurements. Their boundaries have held up under cross-validation, across regions, across class systems, and across more than four years of new certificates.
MPAE doesn't predict who will win a race. It says, with structural clarity, what kind of boat is this — the precondition for every other useful question.
Every boat in the system is described along three independent axes. Together they form a vessel fingerprint — a compact, interpretable summary of structural identity, realized behavior, and inventory-driven mode.
L1 · Direction
What kind of boat is this? Eleven stable archetypes — AEROMAX (pure upwind power), KEELFLEX (form-stability specialist), HEADFORCE (head-driven reaching platform), and eight more. Each boat is anchored so the same certificate lands in the same archetype across builds and across years.
L2 · Expression intensity
How strongly does the boat behave like its archetype? A four-band scale — strong, limited, balanced, anomalous — that captures heel behavior, drive efficiency, and balance. The axis behind why two "similar" boats don't feel the same on the water.
L3 · Wardrobe configuration
What does the boat actually carry? Four wardrobe types — head-driven, main-driven, Code-enhanced, downwind-heavy — that shape close-reach power, downwind punch, and crew-effort profile.
MPAE is grounded in naval-architecture practice. Three properties define it:
The full methodology — including the algorithmic detail behind feature selection, axis recovery, and consensus — is documented in the white paper.
MPAE complements existing naval-architecture and analytics tools; it doesn't replace them.
MPAE adds structural identity to performance predictions. The VPP says how fast; MPAE says what kind.
MPAE provides archetype-level context for flow, resistance, and stability studies — a fleet-scale frame around per-boat numerical work.
MPAE separates structure from realized performance from inventory choices, so race analytics can read each layer on its own terms.
MPAE is not a rating rule, a handicap system, or a tactical AI. It's the structural map underneath those conversations.
The white paper — Understanding the MPAE Fleet Archetypes: A Practical Guide for Naval Architects, Sailmakers, and Racing Teams — documents the eleven fleet archetypes, the measurement framework behind them, and their practical applications for design, sailmaking, and racing professionals.
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The structural foundation surfaces inside both SailrScience products.
Uses MPAE fingerprints to compare boats within and across archetypes, interpret cohort-conditioned performance reads, and explain why a platform behaves the way it does. The eleven archetypes are the structural backbone of the FleetEdge analytics surface.
Uses the same structural foundation to build physics-aware composites — drive, heel, balance — that feed into per-boat analytics and visualization.
For researchers, naval architects, journalists, and institutional contacts: the research arm responds to questions about the model and the methodology.