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It's 60 years since the British inventor Christopher Cockerell demonstrated the principles of the hovercraft using a cat food tin and a vacuum cleaner. Great things were promised for this mode of transport, but it never really caught on. Why?
The hovercraft slides down a concrete ramp and into the Solent. Its engines, propellers and fans hum as it crosses from Southsea, in Hampshire, to Ryde, on the Isle of Wight, travelling 4.4 nautical miles in under 10 minutes.
The journey is more than twice as quick as the catamaran from Portsmouth to Ryde and more than four times as quick as the Portsmouth-to-Fishbourne ferry.
For that matter, why haven't hydrofoils caught on?
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What Happened to Passenger Hovercraft?
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TAPPING? You POLITICIANS! Don't you realize that the END of the "Wash
Cycle" is a TREASURED MOMENT for most people?!
(Score: 4, Funny) by snick on Wednesday November 11 2015, @02:21PM
How expensive could a seagull be? Would it be cheaper if they used chickens?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 11 2015, @02:53PM
Its the shock to the axle and the geartrain (assuming a gas turbine) and the individual fan vanes themselves. Also the eco hippies are going to whine about seagulls being an endangered species. And mothers of traumatized passenger kids watching seagulls get vaporized.
Oh I assure you, I can design a machine that sucks in air and seagulls and blows out air and a pink mist, thats called a "garden chipper shredder" but the fuel consumption to levitate something like that into the air while carrying a payload is going to make SUVs and bizjets look like greenwashing products. Also its going to be expensive and maintenance intensive. Its a miracle that its actually technically possible at all.
Seagulls are actually pretty expensive to deal with. I wasn't kidding about the endangered species thing. There will be protests and EPA costs, not to mention PR. It'll be pretty expensive as a total system cost.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday November 11 2015, @04:34PM
> is going to make SUVs and bizjets look like greenwashing products.
Well, there's your market!
So, which Texan star or billionaire are we going to offer the blingest hovercraft in history to, in order to jumpstart interest?
"Bubba says F-You to Obama and the EPA with a hovercraft from RollingCoalIsForThePoor.com. Why are you still driving a puny Escalade?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 11 2015, @04:38PM
It is like the IoT home systems. Sure they are cool and are all wizzy. But simplicity, ease of use, and cost rule the day. Sure I could hook every single one of my lights in my house to a central computer. It looks cool and is cool. But thats about it. At the end of the day it still just lights up my room and a rocker switch on the wall works just as good and does not come with a service contract.
It is a technical challenge to be sure. But why, when you end up with pretty much the exact same thing which can be had cheaper? I see this sort of thing all the time in software. People throw out years of coding. Because 'its a mess' (translation I dont understand it and am not going to take time to understand it). Total rewrite is undertaken and they end up with either the same thing or worse but slightly technically better.
If you dont beat the cost (both short and long term) of the simpler solution you will not go anywhere with it. Hovercraft are in the realm of 'cool and wizzy' and have specific places where they can be used. But they have to beat a big tub with a propeller.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 11 2015, @04:39PM
Hey VLM, that whooshing noise you just heard wasn't the sound of a hovercraft.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 11 2015, @05:27PM
Yeah yeah I know but there's just so many ways the task is incredibly expensive I couldn't resist the chance to mention the bird kill problem and the difficulty of making turbines that eat large birds and keep running (like jet aircraft engines, well, at least sometimes) and chipper shredder analogies and ...
Its just so roadrunner cartoon, sign up for the ACME air fan and it just works, but really moving enormous amounts of air is just a PITA engineering challenge.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday November 11 2015, @06:02PM
Just make sure to thaw them first.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"