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Comment by garciasn | Hacker News Reader

Hitting debris or the bottom while on foils is NOT recommended and can be catastrophic to the boat and its passengers.

Hydrofoils haven't taken off because of the above and, primarily, the high operation, maintenance, and build costs. Historically, these just have not been more economical than their traditional counterparts.

Being that this particular company is not focused on those parts of this and are solely focused on the technology being green, my guess is they are ignoring the operation, maintenance, and build costs and hoping that they can be all hand-wavey about that part--which probably will not pay off for them.

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From an engineering perspective the hull would have to be strong enough to support all the weight of the vessel on the foil mounts. I imagine this is not a trivial problem to solve and the vessel would have to be purpose designed for foils, so little retrofitting may be possible on existing vessels.

I clipped a granite plinth Efoiling - your ride comes to a very abrupt halt. Thankfully the board was fine and the carbon fiber wing had just minor scuffing.

I would be concerned that the carbon fibre has been significantly weakened by the impact.

https://www.resinlibrary.com/knowledge/article/can-carbon-fi...

> Since fibre strength significantly exceeds that of the matrix (epoxy), damage usually occurs in the matrix before the fibres for laminate composites. In some instances, this is relatively easy to detect; snapped fibres protruding from the object’s surface. Yet more microscopic damage – something which can spread through the object – is harder to detect even though it can significantly reduce the mechanical properties of the composite.

I’m concerned, but it’s a hobby where the penalty for failure is getting wet.

That looks like a lot of fun, kind of like a OneWheel on water, but safer because water lands a lot softer than the hard ground does!

Weight of the boat + dynamic loads.

Great point lol it's not like the carried load will be the same all the time and I didn't even consider that :)

Well, there's cargo, and there's also waves, wind, and whatever it might bump in to.

My understanding was that, similar to a sail on a boat, you really want to be able to "trim" your foil, which is really complicated. You can have a good "average" foil but it will really be great in most conditions.

Candela foils are dynamically trimmed under computer control.

Boats are, in general, an unpopular way to carry passengers these days, and of those, hydrofoils have a significant share. It's debatable whereas anything ense has "taken off" if hydrofoils didn't.

There must be thousands or tens of thousands of ferries around the world, yet hydrofoil ferries are as rare as rocking horse shit, so I don't think this is correct.

I know only a couple of non-ferry scheduled passenger boats (no car deck) and half of these are easily hydrofoils. I guess that depends on the region, though.

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