Scary Thought

No need to watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvpEzWGVk94&t=610s for daddy's going to summarise, but it touches upon a demographic decline in boating.

Far and away the largest market for recreational boats in particular is the US, as it's long been for recreational aircraft.

And in both cases ~ as with truck driving ~ the median age of ownership has drifted upward for years and not least because of ever-growing capital and operational cost  only readily affordable to retirees for instance.

And the reason he says that neither boats nor outboards have changed much in the last decades is because compared to automobiles (of which 80 million are bought in any one year), sales won't support either innovation or automation of manufacture.

As a result, boats remain largely hand-made and in materials that have not changed much in years (unlike owners) viz. sheet alloys or glass and resin composites laid up or finished by hand. Do put your hand up if that sounds familiar to the light aircraft industry in the US too, Burt Rutan excepted?

Our vlogger also points out that both industries ~ where it applies to crewed craft ~ are fairly heavily regulated; and I would add 'whereas teenagers can fly simulators for free with just as good a view out front and no danger of dying in the process'.

Here's the kicker, however... none of the foregoing applies to drones, which is why the annual production of multicopters now exceeds the number of flying machines ever built throughout all of human history. (Ed. he hasn't checked that as usual but suck it up).

Taking our current build we're using no material that isn't either innovative or mass produced. Regulation, licensing and liability are either absent or the more affordable and there is no risk of drowning where it involves driving a drone from the comfort of a cubicle.

Thus it is that the seas will sooner or later be littered with disposable drones going about their business, as the skies will be filled with airborne drones doing much the same thing whenever they don't happen to be raining terror from unlimited confine.

It's worth then taking a punt on whether maritime drones will ever outnumber that population of crewed vessels, though nothing would likely surprise those old enough to afford an airplane...

...or boat?

Unbearable Lightness

Here's an issue you don't here often in aviation: 'it needs to be heavier'.

In a lifetime in and around aviation I never yet encountered an effort to add weight to a flying machine from choice. The only exceptions that spring to mind involve the weight and balance calculation: take a radar out of the nose of a fighter jet and you generally need to add a lead weight to compensate for its loss. Else, you add ballast to an airship to compensate for the lack of a payload that might include either cargo or passengers: without which it is headed skyward pretty fast.

This nice man on YouTube however discovered that left to itself at just 15kg it does not hover well at all: for its propellers are turning too slowly to react sufficiently fast enough to adjust its attitude and position.

It is for reasons like this that I am glad to be applying such propellers and motors to seaborne instead of airborne drones. For besides the issue of ballast, the latter use a considerable amount of energy from having to constantly alter the RPM of each of its motors... while maritime drones are either cruising at a constant RPM or loitering at zero.

Nor does there appear to be any reason why in building them I should be looking to add extra weight; as we shall continue to see in subsequent posts.

Dukka Deluxe

If you're following this with a view to building the good news is that the material of choice is widely available ~ and worldwide ~ in the form of tile backing board.

Proceed with caution however, as whether these are double-sided or not depends on whether in turn they are destined for wall (yes) or floor (no).

Though available in various thicknesses, generally missing is my preferred choice in the form of 25mm... although my dream sheet as Baldrick may have said is actually available from a UK manufacturer pictured above.

It costs £17 online tho' delivery is £27... sign of the times.

For now then, we'll run with 20mm or three-quarter inch.

Slow Burn

Don't often get the chance to spot one of these babies with the lid off, but there are no V-8s out there any bigger that I've seen and this must surely have been a ship's diesel engine. The crank-shaft nowhere to be seen, what appears likely a cam-shaft to drive what might either have been valves ~ noting the sleeves for push-rods ~ or else mechanical fuel-injectors.

Reciprocating engines would first have been built on this scale, generally for raising water out of mines likes those in Cornwall or elsewhere in the UK... and powered by steam whether by means of condensation or compression. Such large displacement engines would afterwards be adapted as horizontal engines that powered cotton and woollen mills in place of water-wheels in the north of England.

What I most like about these diesels is that they run at around the same low speed, some barely on throw of a piston per second, and must sound not dissimilar. They more than any other reciprocating engine truly show how internal combustion would replace external ~ in a boiler ~ by relatable and surprisingly simple means. (Despite the devil as ever being in the detail, the workhorses in any number of factories were even simpler engines fed by coal-gas).

If you want to see one of Diesel's original prototypes you can do so not far from the scrap-yard pictured here, at the bus and truck museum in Leyland. Its inventor took a ferry one day between England and France, and has yet to arrive. It is suggested that the reason he (was) disappeared was because he pointed out that his engines would run on anything, including corn or peanut oil... which will not have gone down well in Texas, for instance.

At one time I would have regarded that as fanciful, whereas nowadays it would not at all surprise me. We battle, as St Paul said, with powers and principalities beyond what diesel engines might produce.

(Ed. He didn't actually mention diesel engines.)

Why Corps Corpse

There's a sweet-spot in innovation that SMEs occupy, the way mammals co-existed and eventually replaced dinosaurs. The company behind this CADDIS is one of those inhabiting such a space.

Military procurement, except maybe in times of war, is uninterested in individuals because the governments they serve are equally so; and the two are in a symbiotic relationship in which should the host suffer, then so might the parasite.

Thus it was that the inventor of the bouncing bomb could be courted in the 1940s, whilst the inventor of the hovercraft was dismissed by all branches of the forces in the UK a decade later... world war being the difference.

The only way for example that BAE Systems could pioneer products in fast-moving situations is to buy whichever company has developed them, as they had to do with Malloy Aeronautics.

The reason is several-fold, but rests largely upon the fact that we are herd animals and always prepared to sacrifice the individual for safety in numbers. Thus anyone in government is likely to run with the safest bet, in the form of the largest defence contractor, for fear of looking silly.

Conversely, that contractor is unable to develop anything off the wall for the same reason. Besides, taking any one concept in particular, only senior staff would be in a position to make choices as to what to develop, and old dogs rarely invent new tricks.

It gets worse, because new ideas have to be progressed as projects with a sizeable budget that have to be run past senior members of the corporation who are far enough "in" with politicians and sufficiently close enough to retirement not to stray too far off-piste.

Thus it is that whilst two-thirds of Russian tanks are being destroyed by Toys-R-Us drones, the largest defence contractors in the West will be working on incremental improvements to existing tanks, helicopters or crewed aircraft; a bit like improving the cavalry's tackle and oatmeal whilst the opponents are developing machine-guns.

This past week the Polish president marvelled at the UK's complacency in the face of military deployments around Europe's flanks, whilst the last UK Minister for Defence (who had actually been in the military instead of the media, which is novel for the UK) suggested it would only take ninety minutes of wider conflict before the country came under direct attack from Russia.

Meantimes we're focussed squarely on trying and failing to stop an inflatable navy, the way old people in care are unable to look too far beyond where tea and diapers are coming from.

The reason though that whatever I developing uses air- instead of water-screws is because they work in both, as I discovered when a prototype began to sink and yet could be steered to safety by such means.

The CADDIS pictured, developed by an SME in Portsmouth, can be sunk to a depth of thirty metres and yet pop up for flight using its rotors alone. The reason they can experiment in this way in the historic heartland of the Royal Navy ~ who cannot for the foregoing reasons ~ is because they are less worried about being spotted naked whilst wearing new clothes.

So we'll just keeping calm and carrying on, won't we Gromit?

Caddisflies are insects with a waterborne larval but airborne adult form; you'd think they include mosquito larvae ~ scourge of every water-butt ~ but don't.

Flat-Cat Build #12

Sometimes it's about knowing when to stop, so I'll hang the cat from the rafters for now to see whether its foam-and-skewer methodology can be applied to the mono.

I've one such already built out of the same stock sheet of laminated ply, where you can see that to provide the required stiffness I extended keel and outriggers proud of the deck; using the aforementioned technique I believe we can make that simpler again.

I'll retain two cross-bars at the rear, though I may attach a rudder to the nearest of the two here to see whether that might be enough to offset the torque of a single motor (which would bank the craft in the opposite direction).

Bear in mind motor, speed controller and battery constitute some 90% of the costs: replacing two with just one of each would practically halve the overall cost.

It is therefore back to Wickes to buy another sheet before we start building... and don't worry because I'll hold your hand throughout so there's no need for tears.

Livestream of Consciousness

On the basis of some metrics the Chinese economy has already overtaken the US tho' it takes a 'tuber to show why: his home-build hack is able to live-stream video from altitude. The Western military-industrial model inflates prices underwritten by taxpayers, within economies appearing to live beyond their means like a junkie on credit. This is unlikely to change without external stimulus: which generally needs to be military conflict.