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?
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.
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
I mis-read that as a caravan of spiders.. hitching a ride on a military tank for 5000 miles.
How big is "a load" of diesel?
It can carry a shipload of the stuff.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
Actually, according to the link yo provided, the fuel tank is 2,000 gallons.
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.
My grandfather was a stevedore (longshoreman) and I actually phoned and asked him. He said smaller coastal ships could go about 2,000 to 2,500 nautical miles, while larger cargo and container ships could go 5,000 NM or more, depending on how much fuel they took on. Obviously, transatlantic container and cargo ships have to hold enough fuel to get themselves across the Atlantic.
So less that 2 MPG???
Doesn't sound that great even with a crew of 10 a 747 gets better milage per seat.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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
Manufacturing is overrated.
..." trumps "Made in ..." any day.
"Designed in
Just what I was thinking. They never say how big the tank is. The boat could be very efficient or it could be the equivalent of a super tanker. Actually super tankers are not to bad on the efficiency stakes, long water lines, but I think the point still stands. Really it is a case of bad reporting. It is like my friend who is working on quantum teleportation at ANU. Every couple of months the local news will pick up a story about something they will do and somehow spin it that we will be tele-porting around like Capt Kirk in 15 or so years. As he always says, assuming they can solve all the hard problems, it will work great as long as you don't mind being ripped into your component particles and then having 50% of them left behind in the process.
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.
it will work great as long as you don't mind being ripped into your component particles and then having 50% of them left behind in the process
Oh, so its a weight loss program too? Gad, is there anything quantum physics can't do!!!11
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.
a metric shitload is 10 loads
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
People think heavy cars are safer because heavy cars are safer. Sometimes people are right.
Large cargo ships are incredibly efficient at moving stuff around. The fuel costs are essentially zero to move a pound of stuff from China to here in a container. A vague ballparky number that'll get you in the area is 40 gallons per TEU per 1000 miles. That's 40 gallons of bunker fuel to more one 20 foot container 1000 miles, and that with a smaller ship.
It's all the everything else that costs money and fuel.
This thing sounds sort of crummy in terms of efficiency, which isn't too surprising. It's small, it's got a lot of stuff up in the air, relative to its size. It's probably moving pretty fast. At 12 tons all up, and 2 tons of cargo capacity, it's in the same ballpark as say a 40 foot sailboat (which happen to have easily-driven hulls, so the fact that it has sails is irrelevant), and a 40 footer will drink maybe 1 gallon per hour at 6 knots. That would take her 12,000 miles on the same 2000 gallons.
Note, however, your 40 foot sailboat wouldn't have anything like 2000 gallons on board. More like 50 to 100.
I'm having a littke trouble buying the 2000 gallon tank, on this thing, since that would run about 6 or 7 tons right there, which seems all out of proportion to the rest of the boat.
Finally, Ugo Conti is the inventor, but Jim Antrim from the bay area actually did the design work and the engineering. I think it was built up in Washington (Anacortes, maybe?)
The article sucks.
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.
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.
boy, are you easy to please.
ever seen this before? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Shadow_(IX-529)
How much is that in Libraries of Congress?
My trawler yacht has a 130 ton displacement with a 24 litre diesel engine .
At 1000 rpm (cruising) it does 9 knots which gives it 12000 miles range on
10,000 US gallon tanks or 1.23 gallons per mile. However my payload is 10 people
and 25 tons of equipment.
"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.
Most people refuel in Bermuda and the Canary islands when sailing across the Atlantic. That's pretty close to the middle of the ocean. Nuclear powered aircraft carriers go 20 years on a fillup.
moox. for a new generation.
They're nautical gallons.
The white zone is for loading and unloading only. If you need to load or unload go to the white zone. It's a way of life
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.
Columbus got over 2,000 miles per galleon.....