Research · White paper
A measurement-grounded taxonomy for the global ORC fleet. Built on 9,591 scored ORC boats of 11,207 analyzed (July 2026). 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 archetypes 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 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
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.
Expression
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
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.
MPAE is grounded in naval-architecture practice. Three properties define it:
The full methodology is documented in the white paper.
MPAE complements existing naval-architecture and analytics tools; it doesn't replace them.
MPAE adds structural identity to the physics. 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.