A much better idea is to use some 4 surfboards. Have you ever seen a board with a step? Are all boards slow? Do they have problems with planing?
Hydro 15hp = 150kg of thrust. 150kg is not a small amount. Far beyond muscle propulsion....
You know--you're making me realize that I'M the one making this too hard.
Well--foils are not easy. But they're the heart of what I think I bring that is new. Very, very long transverse travel, at least two, more like 3 or four times the travel, of any other oscillating foil setup that's ever been tried. And SERIOUS torque and power--not legs or arms only, but this:
Look at how long her pull is, and add another foot and a half, because of the way I've added mechanical advantage on the leg drive. SERIOUS travel. SERIOUS power. HUGE stroke and "useful sweep,", for a sculling setup, on blades 18 inches deep and 7.5 inches wide. Not some pissant rotary propeller with a useful crank travel of at most ten inches. No, the pull travel alone is 5 feet, for a big boy. I'm not farting around. A linear propeller with an equivalent blade sweep of three ****""*""" feet in diameter. A meter-diameter rotary propeller equivalent. In WATER. Transverse, not rotary sweeping. That's utterly critical.
But it's not enough. I'm convinced it simply must have variable pitch, to be able to utilize all that power, if you really want to go somewhere fast and not just putter. That's very hard to come up with an approach for, although not nearly as hard to execute. Like adding suspension or steps or wings, it's not necessary for proof of concept, but if you're going to be doing it anyway, you might as well go all the way. Stopping with a crude setup, like solid blades and simple, passive hinges with stops to set a fixed pitch, is kinda boring. Like this:
I mean, that's great, and thank you, Mark Palmquist, for your work in making a prototype that would take me a year, so I can see that what it does is about what I would expect it to do. Cool to see in action. But if you hate building things and would prefer to keep exploring, like me, you build it in your head, look at it, observe it working, frown, and try something better, with more potential. Might not work. Probably won't. But if you "can't" build but are good at throwing out and exploring many ideas, and researching whether they have theoretical potential based on the literature and related prototypes, well, that's what you do. I'm such a bad builder I figure I only have one attempt. Or at least, I must try to put in all my "refinements"--my experimental stuff--at once. I already "know" what simpler stuff will do, in my head. Not worth the effort, for me, of building something where I already know what its limitations will be, and where I've already convinced myself there's a better way to address them.
I'm a pure inventor, not a builder. Like Tesla, I build and try out many, many examples in my head before I even try to cut or glue anything. By the time I get to cutting and gluing. I already know what's wrong with it before I'm even halfway through.
My first model broke, and is way too slow, and the pull pins atop the foil are too far apart. And the floats are way too small, and the rear floats should be wider apart to match the front, etc., etc. If I had the skills of Daniel Riley, "rctestflight" in the first ground effect airplane above, I could have prototyped a model in a day or two, or at most a week. It takes me more like a year and a half to learn my lessons. I get bogged down in the details, and try to do too much at once.
I understand my foils. They're fairly sophisticated, but I know what I'm doing and why. I understand my lines and pulleys and elastic, and I know it will work. I know my sliding footplate will work. I have already proven to myself all my four "cars"--foils and pull handles--will work, very well indeed, far better than I expected.
Where the foil tracks (tubes) pass through the fuselage, is tricky. It's an opportunity to support the tracks against the fuselage in the middle, that really can't be passed up. They are very long and skinny. They will bend. My coat hanger wires on model one do, and it's a problem that needs solving. I believe I've solved it (U brackets). Just need to put it into practice.
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