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Spider-Like Catamaran Travels 5,000 Miles On One Tank
Lucas123 writes "Proteus, a Wave Adaptive Modular Vessel that looks like a spider, is so fuel efficient that it can travel 5,000 miles on one load of diesel fuel. The 100-foot-long, 50-foot-wide boat rides on metal and fabric pontoons that have hinges and shock absorbers to flex with the motion of the waves, which helps it to skim over the water at a max speed of 30 knots. It made its debut yesterday in New York harbor."
http://www.wam-v.com/
with some stats:
http://www.wam-v.com/characteristics.htm
still didn't see tank size though...
@AlexSheive
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteus_(WAM-V) a "load" for this boat is 2,000 gallons.
These "feel good" kind of stories are really annoying, because they leave out so many details that most people end up with a completely skewed perception of the facts.
I did a quick search to get an idea if 2.5 MPG was good for a boat. Here's an article that tested the fuel efficiency of some standard boats - ie boats with normal hulls that sit down in the water, with regular screw propeller propulsion. So they should be pretty poor compared to many other style hulls, etc.
One particular boat has a V8 350 cubic inch engine that can do 51 MPH. So that's pretty fast. At that speed the boat gets 2.4 MPG, which is basically the same as the boat in the story. At a slower speed of 26.9 MPH it gets 3.6 MPG, which is almost 50% better than the "spider boat". Now obviously the range of these boats are vastly reduced - it's like rocketry, where the more fuel you carry to gain distance, the more weight you have to haul, so the actual gain in distance is only small (or perhaps even negative). So these boats can't begin to touch 5000 miles on one tank.
So perhaps the significance of this story is ratio of the range to fuel efficiency? If so, it would have been nice if the author would have simply said that.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
A mid-range recreational yacht (Say, $60k and 28 feet) will get anywhere from 0.5 - 4mpg. Usually towards the lower end of that scale.. considering the size and speed of that catamaran, it's really not too bad.