Editing Openai/68acd283-ffd0-8007-a41f-aba460e3dd99 (section)

=== Assistant: Short version: speeding up in head seas makes the slamming more frequent, which increases misery, especially in short-p… ===
Short version: speeding up in head seas makes the slamming more frequent, which increases misery, especially in short-period chop. Shocking, I know.

What changed going from 6 kn to 8 kn on a 40 ft boat (head seas):
* Encounter period (Te) gets shorter at 8 kn, so you’re hitting more crests per minute. The table and bar charts above show it clearly.
* The Relative Misery bars at 8 kn are higher than their 6 kn counterparts for the same seas, with the biggest pain increase in the shortest-period case (2 ft @ 2 s).
* The comfortable minimum period vs height curve does not depend on boat speed, because it’s based on steepness H/L. Physics doesn’t care how fast you insist on suffering; comfort still demands longer periods as height goes up.

Use it practically:
* If you’re bashing upwind in anything under ~5 s period, slow down or crack off. Chasing 8 kn into 2–4 s chop is a hull-thumping ego exercise.
* Once period gets into the 6–8 s range for 6–10 ft seas, speed choice matters less for comfort, and course/trim matter more.

If you want, I’ll rerun this for beam and following seas. Misery behaves differently when the crests aren’t marching straight at your bow.