Navigating by the Sun

Uh... Lets see, a solar boat that takes 6 months to cross the atlantic. That only makes it marginally slower than Columbus... Take that solar panel, stand it up and use it for a sail, then maybe you will have a semi usefull craft.

My guess is that in a tragic sense the boat may well derive it's final nuance of power generation from the bio-luminescence life at the bottom of the ocean. Target arrival date...eh, 6 months...no hurry there. I wonder if this time line accounts for all the provisioning stops they'll need. Who foot the bill on this idiotic "test"? Hopefully not taxpaying people.

My guess is that the solar power intercepted by the boat would be less that the power in the waves intercepted by the boat in this sort of an ocean trip. I wonder if anybody has tried a wave power boat? Great if it can absorb the waves and leave a calm wake. I don't know how to do it of course. Just a thought.

Large gyroscopic stabilizers are/were used to help keep ships from tiliting too much... I wonder if torque from that could be harnessed. (I suppose nearly anything can be "harnessed"... it just might not make any sense to do it.)

I live in Trivandrum in the state of Kerala, India. We have a wave power experiment running just 20 km south of here. They tell me that the power incident on a meter of coast averaged over a year is nearly 10 kW !! And the Arabian sea is not as stormy as the Atlantic ocean. This is what started me thinking of a wave power boat. As with all such renewable sources of power until we have better ways of storing energy, it can only be used in concert with conventional power sources. But it can reduce the use of fossil fuels. We need to see if gyros can do the trick. I myself had thought of articulated floats bobbing up and down relative to each other and absorbing the energy of the waves to lend some help to the propeller. A flexible ship instead of a rigid hull ! Like the solar powered boat it may not make economic sense now. But then I have heard that Eddison's record player did not make sense when he invented it.

It seems very strange to start a transatlantic crossing from a land-locked country. How much time would be saved if they actually started on the ocean?

The Swiss have an airforce and Jamaica has a bobsleigh team. No-one could think of a use for Bell's new telephonic voice apparatus. The telegraph was to the nineteenth century what the internet is to the 21st. No-one would go to earth orbit using gunpowder.

It is one thing to work out what can be done. Engineering is about developing and exploiting it.

One has to start somewhere, even if one doesn't know where one is going.

"It pays to look before you leap for fear that you should fall. Stop and stand and look too long and you will not leap at all."