Trimaran

[1][2] The word "trimaran" is a portmanteau of "tri" and "(cata)maran",[3] a term that is thought to have been coined by Victor Tchetchet, a pioneering, Ukrainian-born modern multihull designer.

[5] The first double-outrigger boats were developed by the Austronesian people and are still widely used today by traditional fishermen in maritime Southeast Asia.

"[4] In the 1950s and 60s, Arthur Piver designed and built plywood kit trimarans, which were adopted by other homebuilders, but were heavy and not sea-kindly by modern standards.

[18] Other designers followed, including Jim Brown, Ed Horstman, John Marples, Jay Kantola, Chris White, Norman Cross, Derek Kelsall and Richard Newick, thus bringing the trimaran cruiser to new levels of performance and safety.

[26] Francis Joyon and a crew of five in the maxi trimaran IDEC SPORT set the absolute (wind or mechanically powered) time for the fastest maritime circumnavigation, in 40 days 23 hours 30 minutes 30 seconds of sailing between Dec 2016 and Jan 2017.

[28] Hydroptère, an experimental sailing hydrofoil trimaran, briefly reached 56.3 knots (104.3 km/h; 64.8 mph)[29] near Fos-sur-Mer, but capsized and turtled shortly thereafter.

[30][31] Competing with a giant trimaran the BMW Oracle Racing team won the 2010 America's Cup for the Golden Gate Yacht Club on February 14, 2010, off Valencia, Spain.

It found that there was an optimum location for the outer hulls in terms of minimizing wave generation and consequent power requirements for operating at high speeds with a payload of 1,000 tonnes.

[34] In 2005 Austal delivered the 127-metre trimaran (417 ft) Benchijigua Express to Spanish ferry operator Fred Olsen, S.A. for service in the Canary Islands.

Capable of carrying 1,280 passengers and 340 cars, or equivalents, at speeds up to 40 knots, this boat was the longest aluminum ship in the world at the time of delivery.

In October 2005, the United States Navy commissioned for evaluation the construction of a General Dynamics litoral combat ship trimaran designed and built by Austal.

[38] They were initially built by many shipyards, but by the turn of the century only two companies were still building larger vessels of over 70 metres and 3,000 Gross Tons.

She was built as a technology demonstrator ship for the Royal Navy's Future Surface Combatant, and has been used to prove the viability of the hull form.

Designed by New Zealand Naval Architects LOMOcean Marine this ship combined a number of existing advance technologies into a single, unique platform; a wave-piercer trimaran hull from, constructed exclusively of infused vinylester carbon fibre cored sandwich materials for all structural elements, with external "stealth" geometry and features intended to reduce detection.

The KRI Klewang (625) caught fire because of an electrical short-circuit in the engine room during a maintenance period on September 28, 2012, and was a total loss.