Adaptive Rake: Stability at Speed, Without the Drag

Every underwater appendage has a cost at speed: drag. The traditional answer is to retract the stabilizer and give up the comfort. Adaptive Rake is our answer, and it means you keep both.

Adaptive Rake is RotorSwing's patented positioning technology that automatically angles the stabilizer rotor into an optimized position, reducing drag and power consumption at higher cruising speeds while maintaining stabilization performance.

What Adaptive Rake does

As your speed rises, the system continuously repositions the rotor at an optimized angle to the flow. The stabilizing force stays; the drag and the power consumption drop. In practice that means maximum stability up to 16 knots without retraction and without loss of speed due to drag.

There is a second benefit that shows up at the fuel dock rather than at the helm: less drag is less resistance to push through the water, so the Rake function reduces fuel consumption at higher cruising speeds.

RotorSwing patented the technology in 2018. It works hand in hand with the rotors Adaptive Rake controls, and like everything else on the platform it is driven by the case for electric stabilization: precise, quiet electric positioning rather than hydraulic actuation.

RotorSwing's own rake drawing: the orange rotor swept through a fan of angles from horizontal and fully retracted to vertical and fully deployed, over open water

Where you get it

Adaptive Rake is included on both rotor systems, in both the Underway and the Underway + ZeroSpeed configurations. It is not an option to specify or a package to upgrade into. See systems that include Adaptive Rake.

The electric fins take a different path to low resistance (a streamlined profile rather than a raking rotor), so Rake is a rotor-family technology. How it fits alongside the rest is easiest to see from the six core technologies.

What an owner does with it

The most telling detail in the field: owners leave it on.

A cream-hulled Elling motor yacht under way on open blue water, flying the Dutch ensign

“The Rake function is sufficient in almost all cases and is basically always switched on for comfort, even on inland waterways.”
Fam. van der Linden, Elling E4

That is the point of the design. Not a mode you manage, but a behavior the system handles while you watch the water.

If your cruising profile lives in the upper half of the 3 to 16 knot range, Adaptive Rake is the difference between choosing comfort or speed and simply having both. Check what that means for your yacht specifically.

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