Bridge Over Troubled Water

One more piece of homework, kids, and we're set up for flight-school tomorrow.

These are the blueprints for how we might 'vector' our rearmost motors in order to transition from hovering over land to planing on water. It's quite exciting, isn't it?

My preference at this stage is the pusher propeller, because it is pushing the craft on a thrust-line that coincides broadly with its centre of gravity, so that it is less likely to pitch the nose either up or down.

The reason it is fixed to a 'swing-arm' is that it can be motored around that 'quadrant' with a drive-wheel into different positions.

It is not where I got the idea from, but look at the mechanism behind Tower Bridge in London!

Though it's very similar, because of all of that weight it did not really become practical until steam engines were invented to power the hydraulic pumps required to move it.

We won't have that problem, will we!

(And it's called a bascule bridge, because it's counterbalanced like a set of scales).