Regent's Ground-Effect Vehicle Reimagines Coastal Travel | Hacker News Reader

Regent's Ground-Effect Vehicle Reimagines Coastal Travel

spectrum.ieee.org

48 pointsrbanffy47 comments

"The Seaglider is designed to handle ocean swells up to a meter and a half high" - that severely limits where it can be used or during which seasons.

TBD but I'm hoping those constraints are largely in taxi mode! When it's flying it's much higher up:

> Like similar “Type A” WIGs, the Viceroy’s preferred altitude is about half the length of its 19.8-meter wingspan, so 10 meters above the water. Much above that and a WIG can no longer exploit its aerodynamic edge, and loses stability.

I really want something like this to work, ideally so successfully that it keeps scaling up. Theres such beautiful aerodynamic efficiency from WIG.

Also a huge fan of what looks like a very smart lift generating blown wing, which also could really help this get out of the water fast, give it good efficiency

I guess you might be able to get around this problem if the vehicle can take off and land on a land based airstrip and then stay at 10m over the water. Otherwise that is a crippling limitation since you not only need the ocean to be relatively calm when taking off, but also when landing.

Usually these planes take off and land on rivers, bays, and other protected shores with few waves.

For FAA purposes this is 100% not a plane.

Regulatory arbitrage is part of the value.

Physics doesn’t care about regulations though. I hope the people who fly these are certified to fly passengers.

>> like this to work, ideally so successfully that it keeps scaling up.

There are hard scale issues. The wings must remain close to the water for ground effect to be a thing. But the thing still needs to bank to turn. That means one wingtip getting higher to the point it can lose GE lift, and the other lower to the point it might strike a bigger-than-average wave. The longer the wings, the less the craft can bank in a turn. Get too large and in-ground-effect flight becomes impractical/dangerous.

Good concerns honestly.

I wonder how much turning you could get just from adjusting motors. Especially if each of those 12 motors can individually adjust, I'd imagine you could get some decent yaw.

Also as per the quote which helpfully points out, WIG is typically flying half it's wing height. Since wingspan and altitude are thus linearly corresponded I'm not not sure (not convinced either way) that there's a problem (or not) from wingspan.

Not to mention watercraft. A fishing boat can easily have an antenna mast 5m above the water, that's awfully close.

It would be cool to have a fast electric ferry service around the Bay Area. Ride your e-bike to the ferry terminal and get to the other side! Cool traffic dodge.

I think Navier was doing some but it was limited, specific routes and a while back. But it's something to look into.

China has also been developing secret modern erkanoplans https://www.hisutton.com/Chinese-WIG-2025-07.html

wonder if this is how China expects to invade Taiwan.

The sea state in the Taiwan Strait is often pretty rough. If WIG vehicles have any military value it's likely to be on inland waters where weather conditions are typically more benign.

The hisutton.com website is full of the recent Chinese naval developments, including huge floating landing piers and various novel submarines and ships. The pace and scale of investment is such that it seems they are building the capacity to genuinely do an opposed invasion

Be interesting to see the efficiency metrics on this compared to high aspect ratio planes.

Here's hoping for many good-weather/calm seas days...

Everything old is new again: https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2001/1001/110.html

indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspian_Sea_Monster

And https://www.seacheetah.com/ and https://seawingsproject.eu/

I wonder how many of these will survive the bursting tech bubble?

Do you have any good examples of tech that was immediately embraced without any prior examples or failures to monetize? I'm having trouble thinking of any.

CDs were invented jointly by Philips and Sony and then sold successfully to the public. By 1991, they had overtaken cassette tape sales

https://www.discwizards.com/index.html%3Fp=5179.html

Nope [1]. Starting in the 70's, with:

> However, like many ideas far ahead of their time, the CD-ROM found few interested investors at first.

And then in 1975:

> Philips Electronics representatives visited Russell’s Battelle lab in the summer of 1975, and they discounted the entire premise of his work.

[1] http://www.computer-timeline.com/timeline/james-russel-compa...

DVD, then. Although that's sort of cheating since it's such a natural evolution from CDs -- it was clearly better than VHS and it didn't take any convincing for people to adopt them.

(you'll probably point to DIVX but that was an experiment with a terrible business model, not a technological failure)

The same link shows that a video was also put on his CD in the 70's!

> Their efforts led to a 20-minute video disc in 1973.

> In 1974 Digital Recording Corporation announced ... the first device to digitize a color image, at a Chicago trade show. The response from large potential investors was rather cool.

And, there's LaserDisc, of course (although analog, unlike the digital disk in the above), which was somewhat of a flop (the ridiculous dimensions being part of the cause).

Tangentially related, BlueRay was more about just waiting for a blue led to be invented, than some new disc tech! [1]

[1] There was a really great youtube video about it, but can't find it. Se here's a bad generic recap: https://ssleec.ucsb.edu/news/nobel/professor-shuji-nakamura-...

I feel like you're moving the goalposts slightly: Yes, all technology involves prototypes, development, gradual refinement to something production-worthy and offered for sale.

LaserDisc is an interesting case: is it failed proto-DVD, or its own separate thing? (analog, more like an LP than CDs or DVDs)

Not all technological innovations involves a failed attempt at commercialization. Microsoft really did try (and fail) to sell tablet devices with WindowsXP, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Tablet_PC it wasn't just a prototype that they experimented with and then shelved until it could be refined later.

We've gone (mostly) full circle.

> Not all technological innovations involves a failed attempt at commercialization

My original comment:

> Do you have any good examples of tech that was immediately embraced without any prior examples or failures to monetize?

No goal post moving on my part.

Not sure I understand the MS tablet example, since it seems unrelated to the sentence before it (going against it).

As mentioned in TFA's title: "Rhode Island company transforms a 1960s Russian flier with modern technology"

https://www.youtube.com/user/RCtestflight

RCtestflight has a bunch of cool ground effect videos.

Loved ground effect since I first saw it on (iirc) beyond 2000 television program. I haven't been able to find any reference to that episode...

Nice to see on the Narraganset; I'm interested in how it does once you pass Beavertail and have to deal with swells.

What's the advantage over a catamaran or hydrofoil ferry?

Speed. 290km/h is pretty quick by maritime standards.

And comfort. With a 1.5m swell, you're gonna feel that in a boat. A hydrofoil will still go up and down.

Whereas a ground-effect vehicle is still flying, so a lot smoother.

Hitting a partially submerged log or lost shipping container is pretty rough on hydrofoil ferries.

Cavitation limits hydrofoil top speeds to ~60 knots. Although, there's a neat profile that just ignores top surface lift entirely [1] (probably at the expense of drag?).

[1] https://www.metstrade.com/news/sustainability/record-hunters...

Isn't that basically how supercavitating torpedoes work?

10m seems quite high for ground effect?

Ground effect height is a function of the size of the wing. I'm guessing these are going to have to be massive to be of any use, otherwise you'd be so close to the water that you couldn't "fly" in choppy water, and with a strong headwind you'll need even more margin because I'm guessing that waves moving with the wind are going to reduce the ground effect.

The picture has a pilot included - suggests this is a pretty small plane with very stubby wing.

According to the article the ground-effect ceiling is around half the wingspan of 20m.

Imagine a fleet of these as ferries between Hawaii's islands for example. Awesome stuff, best of luck to the team!

Except for those pesky waves that Hawaii is known for.

I see this as more applicable in areas coastal metro areas with sheltered waterways and existing ferry systems.

Yup. There's a reason that every photo of these (admittedly cool) vehicles is on a clear day, over calm water.

Jones act!

There's already a project testing these. However the channels between the main islands in Hawaii can be pretty rough. The water gets pretty deep (900m - 3000+m) quickly and due to geography the winds and waves get funneled there and can easily hit 5-10m high. The short distances make it appealing despite the potentially rough sea state and waves.

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