Slashdot Mirror
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."
How big is the tank?
How big is "a load" of diesel?
I mean, honestly, how many ships these days have to refuel for transatlantic trips?
The article doesn't say... so how do we know how astoundingly efficient this thing is?
@AlexSheive
A PROTESS ship in New York Harbor? Surely, the Zerg can't be far behind...
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.
http://www.wam-v.com/characteristics.htm
My sailboat (and galley of rowing slaves) can travel an infinite number of miles on a tank of diesel!
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
7 loads = 1 shitload
That help?
I mis-read that as a caravan of spiders.. hitching a ride on a military tank for 5000 miles.
What we now need, is to recapture the electronics and auto manufacturing leads from Japan, China and South Korea.
Remember this relatively recent slashdot article? I couldn't find the article quick enough but I did find the article it was about. http://www.topgear.com/content/news/stories/1832/ Yup, that would be the fabulous electric car that is so LIGHTWEIGHT that it's not classified as a car anymore.
And no, I didn't catch the answer to your question, I just love watching that car crumple in such amazing ways.
The article says it can travel "farther than across the Atlantic -- on one load of diesel fuel." Er... Isn't this true of most vessels crossing the Atlantic? (Especially ones like, say, the Mayflower?)
That kind of reminds me of the stealth ship in James Bond, Tomorrow Never Dies. Looks quite similar, though it's smaller.
If you want to drive a super lightweight car, go right ahead. Don't tell me what to drive though.
The North Atlantic is not a nice place to be in a storm.
That model requires liberal amounts of rum.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
...so is 2.5 miles/gallon for a lightweight water spider thingy really that great?
They're claiming it's fuel efficient? Since when is fuel efficiency based on number of miles per tank? If that's the case, I'm going to start claiming my 4x4 truck is just as efficient as a compact car...
Superlightweight cars work great: fabulous gas mileage. My old Datsun 1200 weighed just about 1500 pounds and got better than 35 mpg even though it had late '60's engine and electronics. Currently, the Honda Insight is getting like 80 mpg, in large part because it weighs 1800 pounds. Here's the problem: nobody buys those cars. People have a strong herd mentality, and think, first off, that heavy cars are safer, and secondly, that if you have a range of options you choose something in the middle, not something at the very end. Thirdly, as people get older, they buy larger, heavier, more options-rich cars (which is why individual car models bloat over their lifetime, by the way: they're selling to the same people, over and over, only the people are demanding bigger and bigger cars.)
MPG is not really a super-relevant metric for cargo-hauling vehicles. A 747 gets a few feet per gallon, but it can transport about 10x as many people a given distance for a given amount of fuel burnt than a Cessna 152, getting about 17 miles per gallon. Gallon burnt, per pound moved a mile, or something like it, is much more useful. Airplanes are rated in gallons-per-seat-per-mile, basically, and it gives you a much better idea of what the machine's efficiency can be if fully loaded.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Ship builders around the world have recently stumbled upon an amazingly efficient design for ocean travel. The breakthrough came when builders realized they could put large poles on the middle mass of a boat. This gave them a platform on which to mount large sheets of material. At first decorative in nature, on some trial runs, the first users reported that some mysterious force was moving the boat even when the engines were off!
A crack team of scientists determined that this force was a result of changing relative atmospheric pressures resulting in a large amount of mostly nitrogen gas moving in one direction or the other. When they encountered the sheets of material builders had mounted on the boat poles, they exerted pressure on them in parallel with the direction of flow. As a result, ships tended to move in that direction, subject to hull shape. Some very enterprising inventors have recently created sheets of materials and ways of attaching them to the poles that allows ships with oblong hull shapes to even move *towards* the direction of the flow, albeit with some zig zagging back and forth.
This revelation is even more astonishing in light of estimates on efficiency. Apparently, ships built in this manner can go virtually an unlimited distance entirely by using these flows. In fact, the limits of their range are basically the decay rate of the materials employed for the flow catch sheets. We are truly in a new age that will allow worldwide commerce, exploration, and research.
Since there are no gas stations in the middle of the Atlantic, aren't most boats already designed to cross it on one tank?
Looks like it might run on dilithium crystals instead.
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.
Baptism - Is this some new linux distro I haven't heard of?
Get a web developer
The interesting bit here is that you have a small craft making 30 knots crossing on 2,000 gallons; this presumably is out of the norm.
People think heavy cars are safer because heavy cars are safer. Sometimes people are right.
Most of those commercial fishing vessels around 100' LOA are ~100 tons displacement. This vessel is only 12 tons displacement (6.8 tons of which is fuel if my calculations are correct). With that much difference in mass, the commercial vessel would actually be more efficient burning 3 gal/mile, the primary limitation being range due to capacity. I suspect the point of this vessel is more platform stability and high speed capability in heavy seas without adversely affecting range.
Provided you are content to drive a displacement hull (a normal, rounded-vee shape) at no more than its "hull speed" you can go VERY long distances on VERY little horsepower and hence fuel. I am basing this on The Troller Yacht Book by marine designer George Buehler, in which for example, he claims that his 48-foot "Diesel Duck" can go 11,410 miles (Tahiti, anyone?) on a fuel load of 900 gallons i.e. over 12 m.p.g., which makes the snazzy catamaran look pretty bad.
The hitch is, you cover that distance at a speed of 6.77 knots, and it takes you a couple of months. Suddenly the catamaran looks a little better...
Depends on circumstances. A heavy car going a given speed has a lot more energy than a light car moving the same speed.
If you have two heavy vehicles that collide head-on, there's a lot more energy being dissipated in the collision than two light vehicles. Think two train locomotives vs. two bicycles.
It's true that generally speaking a collision between a light vehicle and a heavy vehicle generally results in more damage to the light vehicle...but that could just as easily be seen as a reason to get the heavy vehicles off the road so that the lighter vehicles are safer.
But only because of all the other heavy cars out there. So really, heavy cars are more hazardous... to other drivers :P
Anyhow a heavy vehicle isn't necessarily safer for being heavy, it depends more on construction.
How much is that in Libraries of Congress?
I've been seeing pictures of that thing for a year or two. It was built in Longview, Washington or thereabouts and people 'round here kept posting snapshots of it on their blogs with titles like "What the hell is this thing?"
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Oh, I agree heavy cars don't make the roads safer in aggregate. But people don't buy heavy cars to make the average driver safer. They buy heavy cars because if they get in an accident they want to win.
Isn't that kind of dangerous for a vessel marketed for long-distance ocean travel?
I don't think you have any idea of how much fuel a normal boat uses - it's a LOT!
No sig today...
"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.
Feh. Big deal. A 747 can go 7,260 nautical miles on one load of fuel.
The Space Shuttle can get into ORBIT on one load of fuel.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Light cars have the advantage of handling and braking better than heavy cars (all other things being equal). That's a big +2 for safety for all you keeping track at home, it also 'counts' way more frequently (how many times a year do you swerve or stomp on the brakes, vs how many catastrophic head-on collisions per year).
Mass is a penalty in almost every situation, the only exception I can think of being impact with a less heavy vehicle. It's unfortunate that some think this outweighs all the other benefits to low mass vehicles.
I dream of a day when I can buy a sporty 2000lb or less car that's not an Elise or a homebuilt.
I always get them confused myself.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
But that was at 15 knots and 8700 tons in the tank ... (USS Midway, CV-41)
Infuriate left and right
Once again, sir-
You are thinking of JESUX!
Do NOT let it happen again.
-YG
.
- aqk
F U
!looks_safe
Ahem, there are other people in the world than americans. About 6.3 billion actually. In europe, many people buy small light cars. On top of that, they are often much safer than an SUV. The previous Range Rover has a 2 star euroNCAP safety rating, while my little citroen C3 has a 4 star rating. In a frontal collision at normal speed, I'll be the one stepping out of my car. The guy in the previous Range Rover can't walk because the pedals will have broken his legs, the roof will have come down, the steering wheel which will be pushed backwards will either block him or have broken his ribs, and because of the deformation, the door won't open anymore. The reason why my little car doesn't have that much storage space in the front is because it is filled with strengthening beams and airbags. More and more newer cars even have a 5 star rating. And trust me, if you have seen the results, you don't want to drive in a car with less than 4 euroNCAP stars.
On the one hand, a SWATH has more hull-surface drag - but on the other hand, the greater submerged hull volume means more fuel storage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Waterplane_Are
I especially like this line from the story:
Not aboard for the maiden press voyage? Hmmm,,,,,
~
Personal safety in a crash is only related to total energy dissipated in that total energy dissipated places a hard cap on total energy dissipated through you. Vehicle safety design is centered entirely around dissipating as much energy through all parts of the vehicle except the passengers as possible. Greater vehicle weight is only an automatic lose if you're strapped to the exterior of the vehicle at the impact point.
A better example that illustrates the above principle in a more intuitive manner is running into a rock face at 25mph strapped into the driver's seat of a hummer vs hitting that same rock face at 25mph strapped into a pair of Nike shoes. Total energy dissipated in the first case more than an order of magnitude greater than the second, yet the first is going to be much safer than the second because less energy will actually be dissipated through the passenger.
Lighter cars can actually be far more dangerous in a head-on—even with other light cars—than two heavy vehicles. The problem is that very light vehicles simply do not generate sufficient forces to crumple the frame of the vehicle unless the frame is deliberately weakened to allow for this to happen. This presents a serious safety dilemma with very light vehicles, as crumpling the frame is one of the best ways to minimize forces exerted on passengers in a crash. Optimize for head-ons with other light vehicles (much weaker/easily crumpled frame) and you will be absolutely destroyed in a collision with a heavier car. Optimize for collisions with heavier vehicles (stronger frame) and you will be more likely to die in collisions with other light vehicles as the frame fails to crumple and your internal organs nearly explode out the front of your body due to the massive deceleration.
The further the weights of the vehicles involved in a head-on diverge, the greater the degree to which someone will be subjected to one of the undesirable scenarios above. Unfortunately for light vehicle enthusiasts, all other things being equal, the guy in the lighter vehicle always gets the shorter end of the stick. An otherwise walk-away accident may have been made lethal because one guy was driving an F350 rather than a light pickup, but it's the guy in the Geo Metro who dies.
You're looking at the classical prisoner's dilemma here. Do you raise overall safety by driving the lightest vehicle that meets your needs, or do you make the roads more dangerous but maximize your personal safety by driving a massive SUV?
All types of accidents considered, light vehicles may be safer overall but they're definitely not safer for anyone except the people in the other vehicle when you're looking at a head-on.
I for one welcome our new Spider-Like Catamaran overlords!
as long as you're the one behind the wheel, that's true compared to SOME other cars (here's the actual data: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/nrd-30/NCSA/RNote s/2006/809979.pdf where you might find some surprises, such as the mid size car being safer than an SUV).
Of course, you're also much more likely to kill the person you hit, but hey, don't let that bother you any, we don't mind. You do what you have to in order to be safe.
Me, I'm going to put a tank gun on my car, and if anyone gets too close, POW!!! Better safe than sorry, right?
Roughly what displacement are you writing about?
Pining for the fjords
Columbus got over 2,000 miles per galleon.....
Oh, don't get me wrong. I'm not thrilled about it - I drive a Carolla myself. All I'm saying it these people are motivated by rational self interest. They know that the biggest car in an accident wins, and they want to make sure their family is safer than yours or mine. What pisses me off is SUV drivers in most states don't have to pay more for liability insurance because of political pressure. As we all know, taking into account anything other than your driving record wouldn't be fair. Arg.
I'll see your tank gun and raise you a 1966 Ford Galaxy with a trunk full of ball bearings. You'll get better gas mileage, but I'll go in style.
But that's just it: it's NOT rational. They THINK a heavy car is safer, and it's just not true. It might be safer in one case... a certain type of collision... but as the data shows, you are less likely to die in a car if you drive a full or mid size car than if you drive an SUV. Even better if you drive a minivan, or a full size van (though then we are back to a heavier car).
Compact cars are actually less safe than SUBcompact cars.
So it's not rational self interest, it's perceived safety based on a limited perception OF safety. The data disagrees.