Research · White paper

A name for every kind of boat in the fleet.

Sailors have always sorted boats by feel — light-air flyer, heavy-weather bruiser. The MPAE archetype model does that sorting with measurements: 11,207 boats analyzed within a 12,965-boat governed corpus, every one measured the same way; 9,591 ORC boats scored (July 2026). Eight kinds of boat show up, and each gets a name — each answering how it makes speed, where that speed pays, and what it asks of the crew. The rating rule says how fast a boat should go. The archetype says what kind of boat it is — the question underneath every other useful question.

Photography: FleetEdge™ / SailrScience archive.

What MPAE is

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 archetypes are discovered, not designed. Eight 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.

Special Note

A note on the 2026 archetype census

Two things converged this season: most of the fleet’s certificates moved to ORC VPP 2026, which carries ORC’s published, revised residuary-resistance treatment, and the R16 stack’s R16.4 refresh brought a more accurate RM calculation. The studies those two changes justified resolved the 2026 census to eight archetypes; the 2025 census had cohered around eleven. We adopted eight — a discovery, not a redesign. Accuracy and transparency, built on the foundational truth of the ORC Certificate.

Read the full resolution note on FleetEdge

The vocabulary

Every other speed sport already talks this way.

Say "momentum car" to anyone with a garage habit and they know the whole story in two words: carries speed through corners, hates the brakes, rewards a smooth driver. Cyclists split the world into aero bikes and climbing bikes. One phrase — the type, the benefit, the demand. Offshore sailing's version has run on dock rumor at one end and the rating certificate at the other. The performance archetypes are that vocabulary — except every word of it is measured, from the certificate through the physics to the whole fleet.

One fingerprint per boat

Every boat in the system is described along a small set of interpretable axes. Together they form a vessel fingerprint — a compact summary of structural identity, realized behavior, and inventory-driven mode.

Structural identity

What kind of boat is this?

Eight stable archetypes — AEROSTREAM (Rig-led · Extreme Scale · Downwind Advantage), SPARKFLEX (Extreme Compact · Downwind-Constrained), AEROFORCE (Rig-led · Large Platform · Downwind-Constrained), and five more. Each boat is anchored so the same certificate, under the same taxonomy version, lands in the same archetype every time it is computed; a re-measured certificate or a model revision may legitimately move a boat, and the assignment is dated when it does.

Expression

Realized vs. potential

How strongly does the boat behave like its archetype? The fingerprint captures heel behavior, drive efficiency, and balance — the reason two "similar" boats don't feel the same on the water.

Wardrobe

Inventory-driven behavior

What does the boat actually carry? The sail inventory shapes close-reach power, downwind punch, and crew-effort profile — the same hull sails differently depending on its wardrobe.

How MPAE is constructed

MPAE is grounded in naval-architecture practice. Three properties define it:

Measurement-grounded. Inputs are structural parameters drawn from every ORC certificate — hull form, stability, rig geometry, drive efficiency, heel behavior, CE–CLR alignment — not race results.
Independent axes. The fleet differs along a small number of independent structural axes. Most certificate fields are correlated; the fingerprint is built on the ones that are not.
Reproducible by construction. The eight archetypes are anchored so that the same certificate vintage, under the same taxonomy version, receives the same assignment every time it is computed — and when a re-measured certificate or a model revision legitimately moves a boat, the change is dated. The result is a taxonomy that is repeatable, auditable, and physically interpretable.

The full methodology is documented in the white paper.

MPAE architecture: ORC certificate parameters are transformed into engineered physical measures, from which each boat's archetype assignment emerges.

An insight only SailrScience can produce

Only SailrScience produces this class of fleet intelligence. ORC documents how its rating physics changes; SailrScience reveals what those changes mean across the certificated fleet. By combining matched certificate vintages, certificate-derived physics, proprietary factor decomposition and a version-governed archetype system, SailrScience can trace a VPP revision from its fleet-wide effects to the emergence, convergence and persistence of distinct performance populations.

That is how SailrScience determined that the ORC 2026 transition produced a material but nonuniform hydrodynamic shift—and that three previously separate archetype pairs no longer supported distinct public identities. The finding is not available from an individual certificate, a conventional rating comparison or the VPP documentation alone. It emerges only when the fleet is treated as a governed, longitudinal physics network.

What MPAE is for

MPAE complements existing naval-architecture and analytics tools; it doesn't replace them.

With ORC VPP

MPAE adds structural identity to the physics. The VPP says how fast; MPAE says what kind.

With CFD and DSYHS

MPAE provides archetype-level context for flow, resistance, and stability studies — a fleet-scale frame around per-boat numerical work.

With race analytics

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.

"My next boat will be an AEROSTREAM."

That sentence is what this research is for. Not a label on a chart — a word you can decide with: which boat to buy, which rivals to watch in a given forecast, which trade you are making between a higher ceiling and a more forgiving ride. The VPP says how fast. The archetype says what kind — and what kind is the question that actually gets argued at the dock, in the syndicate meeting, and at the broker’s office. Eight names, three answers each, measured the same way for all 11,207 boats analyzed within the 12,965-boat governed corpus (July 2026).

Read the full methodology

The white paper — Understanding the MPAE Fleet Archetypes: A Practical Guide for Naval Architects, Sailmakers, and Racing Teams — documents the fleet archetypes, the measurement framework behind them, and their practical applications for design, sailmaking, and racing professionals.

Edition note: the current edition reflects the 2026 census — eight archetypes (see the Special Note).

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In FleetEdge and SailEdge

The structural foundation surfaces inside both SailrScience products.

FleetEdge™

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 eight archetypes are the structural backbone of the FleetEdge analytics surface.

FleetEdge fleet archetypes · FleetEdge methodology

SailEdge™

Uses the same structural foundation to build physics-aware composites — drive, heel, balance — that feed into per-boat analytics and visualization.

Visit SailEdge

Discuss the model

For researchers, naval architects, journalists, and institutional contacts: the research arm responds to questions about the model and the methodology.

Contact the research arm