Before we recommence building our tiny flat-cat, a look at the world's biggest and fastest ferry, which is destined to go back and forth across the River Plate in as little as eight feet of water but to do so carrying thousands of passengers and hundreds of cars off the back of 24,000 HP of electrical motors driving eight jet-pumps.
What destroyed the cross-Channel hovercraft in the UK was the above: aluminium wave-piercing catamaran hulls that could travel not much slower, but carry rather more and at much less cost. It was pioneered ~ and still run ~ by Robert Clifford from around 1972 on, who was lucky enough to live on an island (Tasmania) whose connection with the Australian mainland was severed by a bridge collapse: following which he transported nine million passengers in his earlier and more rudimentary craft by way of proof-of-concept.
It looks like a trimaran, incidentally, but isn't... the centre-hull is an effort to reduce the wave-slamming that cats can be prone to and which is not the most comfortable for passengers.
The takeaway for ourselves are the facts that for many applications you cannot beat a cat, and for an increasing number you cannot beat electrical motive power either.
The latter too in this case is provided by a Finnish company that specialises in such drive-trains. The Finns, who live in a cold and inhospitable part of Northern Europe and have among he highest living costs in the world, nonetheless produce all sorts of weird shit. I move containers around a lot, and to pick them off semi-trailers and drop them elsewhere requires a whole lot of mobile crane or 'heavy-lifter'. And who makes them, as per the above, almost exclusively?
Finns. Who like Tasmanians rather put us to shame. You could say the US is expert at shuffling electrons (via the 'net), the likes of these people are experts at moving molecules (via hulls and cranes) whilst the Brits excel at moving things via chemical connections in the brain: music, media, medicine, law, and AI. And sport, principally the watching of.
It's why our economy survives ~ just ~ long after we stopped making things.
