SYO(P)S

The tabloids (and Google's AI) would have you believe that the UK government did recently supply 140 British drones to Ukraine at a cost to you and I of £40 million, but in fact they are sourced from New Zealand firm SYOS ~ although they do manufacture on the south coast of England as you'd expect, as we can at least supply both the GRP and Japanese outboard to furnish it.

As boats go, it could have been drafted a century ago and it's one reason that albeit reluctantly I need to keep developing the flat-cat: my boat, it's better than yours, I can teach you, but I have to charge.

I've asked the team at Teledrone Verify (that's me and the cat) to look into this and though we know where they are made, we're not revealing that because the Soviets have a habit of paying the unemployed or Eastern European immigrants ~ of which we've many in the UK ~ to go and burn it down.

Nonetheless it's safe I feel to suggest that in the background that's the tower that looks like a sailing boat over in Portsmouth. As ever nowadays, instead of making cars, boats or aeroplanes we just make things that look like them to feel better.

We used to be the ones supplying manufactures to other countries to set up their own facility, tho' invariably this state of affairs appears to have been reversed. It's not altogether a bad thing though ~ the Manchester firm Gardner took a licence to manufacture Otto's atmospheric engine, meaning they cornered the market in just about every four-stroke engine in the UK subsequent.

Absorbed into AEG who made the iconic London double-decker buses, they were eventually bought out by Rolls-Royce... who knew a thing or two about making engines themselves.

Blow Over

Back of the serviette stuff but don't worry about that for now: we'll be building soon enough, but prior a discussion of some of the design elements to consider by way of a primer (as in our case aerodynamic considerations outweigh hydrodynamic).

Broadly speaking any rectangular surface extended into a plane is unstable and if it pitch up at all, will continue to do so. This applies to shallow hulls wholly unsuitable for managing swell ~ as hydroplanes demonstrate top left ~ beside deep multi-hulls that do manage rougher seas. The catamaran at bottom right is one such, but even these (like Campbell's 'Bluebird') are not immune at higher speeds.

A reliable aerodynamic solution to such departures is a tailplane or stabiliser pitched far behind centres of lift and gravity, which gives the leverage required to restrain pitch within limits. An alternative is triangular airfoils or delta-wings that stall during such departures and are therefore self-correcting: planing monohulls approximating such outlines are thus less prone to blow over than rectangular footprints ordinarily used in cats and hydroplanes.

Beyond 100 m.p.h. however powerboats do benefit from the air cushion that passes between the hulls of hydroplanes or catamarans, which is why the bulk of them are built that way. There are fast monohulls, but like the latter these also rely on their sheer extent and weight (besides their power) to sustain high speed upon swell.

What we want from the flat-cat in the sketch is ~ beside delivery and construction in flat-pack form ~ to try and retain the lightest possible weight within the outline of a vessel capable of such speeds, and with an efficiency and economy improved by an order of magnitude.

The world that ~ the way things look to be going ~ measures only speed regardless of the cost to the individual, society and the planet is hopefully in retreat. Speed alone, I told Shania Twain, don't impress me much and measures like kt/kW would be the better yardstick.

And indeed kg/m of length at point of manufacture: some among fast HDPE craft  are pushing 300kg/m, which at the get-go I'd like to improve on by a factor of ten.

Smartillery

Largely unnoticed, an amateur 'space-race' to determine just how fast a quadcopter might be persuaded to travel; with the world record bouncing between places as far apart as China, Australia, Switzerland and South Africa.

It continues a trend toward the atomisation of technology, tools available online to anyone anywhere being used to advance science from within garages or kitchens.

This upends the effectively state-sponsored efforts of the 1930s when millions lined the banks of places like the Solent in order to watch record attempts by the likes of Supermarine. Now with electrical drones pushing the speeds of the fastest propeller driven types developed by this illustrious company, the difference is the millions are instigating progress sat at desks, instead of standing by and watching it play out.

What is interesting too is that the propellers are fixed blade, and not at all twisted to the extent they had to be in order to accommodate the high subsonic speeds a late-model Spitfire might experience: this the result of the extraordinary RPMs that electrical motors can sustain. Equally remarkable is the fact these quads can travel horizontally at all ~ the very shallowest angle of attack at such speeds meaning the body itself generates sufficient lift to be able to dispense with a conventional airfoil.

Inevitable then that they should eventually be used as a kinetic means of anti-drone warfare trialed in places as far apart as Finland and South Korea (where at a recent expo no less than eighty companies were offering such technology).

But can you guess which one?

Ed. It's the one in the middle. It closes its prey at a mere 350 km/hr, whereas that one at bottom right which currently holds the world record tops out at 650 km/hr.

CFD, RIP.

People regularly ask me why I don't use computational fluid dynamics (CFD), or at least they used to until my therapist said it was just voices in my head. Though this is why... a post on one forum bemoaning how the 'mesh' of his rigid inflatable (RIB) is incomplete. What it means subsequent is an incursion of digital water to strains of 'My Heart Will Go On'.

Even with that remedied however it has then to be launched within a separate suite of software, by which time you could have built it in the garage and donned waders.

A reason though I intend to prioritise the catamaran over the mono-ski is because I know it will float level from the get-go with its motors and propellers largely clear of the waterline, whilst lending itself to testing on surfaces beside water and at speeds slow enough to be practical on the smallest of stretches. None of this, love it as we do, could be said of the monoski.

Pipe Dreams

Before we bid goodbye to HDPE and PET products applied to boating, let's look at at a bit of live-action innovation from Indonesia, whose 1500 islands demand at least a passing acquaintance with the arts of the sea. The commentary fears for the fate of rainforest given its ubiquitous use of timber ~ tho' often with a veneer of fibreglass ~ but I told them not to worry in view of the fact it'll soon be gone anyway, orang-utans or not.

What is interesting from the first grab is how the outriggers are now furnished with the sort of foam kids use to stay afloat in swimming pools. But to cut to the chase the firm involved is best known for equipping fish-farms, where they use the sort of HDPE piping that otherwise carries water or liquified gas to form the pontoons that surround each pen.

Moving on we can see how via an intellectual leap they experimented with pinching the ends of a heated tube to form the pontoons of a catamaran, before testing it in model form and doing the same thing on a larger scale altogether with their own custom-made jigs and moulds. This resulted in a line of successful rescue boats like the one appearing in 'Thames Water' yellow.

A little-known fact is that the man who is second in UK rich-lists (where I was catapulted from to 70,004,765 after a post headed 'blow-job') is industrialist James Dyson... whose first project was a landing-craft made of polypropylene pipes!

N.B. I added a comment to the video by way of hands-across-the-ocean intended to establish a worldwide fellowship of those dedicated to deployment of plastic piping at sea: motto 'Aquam potius foris ponamus' viz. 'We put our water on the outside'.

Blow Job

We can't depart these shores without examining the other way polyethylene boats are made, which is by inflating what is much like a warmed-over condom within a two-part mould not unlike that in the previous post but turned through the vertical.

Ed. We wish to apologise to anyone affected by the use of today's title, especially those tuning in from care homes or nurseries. Nonetheless we defend our use of tags such as these along with thumbnails of naked women in order to send our stats through the roof. We do respond to feedback however, which should be directed by pigeon-post to Mr Sergey Brin, c/o Google (who kindly supply our digital soap-box).

FoMo? RoMo!

Let's have a look at a way of building boats that is sweeping all before it, at least at this scale. Pioner contracted out production to this specialist means of manufacture in order to become Norway's best-selling brand, for instance. In many ways it's not unlike cooking, as we'll see by examining the method step by step.

Firstly add plastic pellets... of the sort that we use to fill the oceans so that they end up inside our brains every time we eat fish. With these popped into the mould, affix another mould in the shape of a lid. Now warm it up, and roll it over and over such that it stick to the sides.

Remove the casting, or 'boat' as we experts call it, and trim the edges before adding material to which the floor can be fixed along with parts like the transom that are to be glued and screwed into place.

It's called Rotary Moulding and like much else in the modern world was invented here in Britain as far back as 1855 when it was used to cast artillery shells with a nice even thickness... before the same method was used to make chocolate Easter eggs.

So once where we pioneered the manufacture of shipping vessels, we now specialise in Cadbury's cream eggs instead. Which is us in a nutshell really: lazy bastards who can't even produce confectionery without support from the USA.

Ed. He's being a bit harsh ~ watch the vid and you'll see the machinery involved is actually made by Alan Yorke Engineering in Northamptonshire. Well done Alan!