While driving to work a few days back I noticed some people hoisting a small red airplane looking thing from a trailer. As the lettering on the wing of the thing indicated, it was a saildrone. When I got home I went to their website http://saildrone.com. There wasnt anything there except a home page, but they have since fleshed it out some. Anyway, some pictures of the saildrone.
Here they are unloading the saildrone from its trailer. At a distance it looks like the tail is at right angles to the main wing but thats an optical illusion. The horizontal spar that the tail is mounted on is actually at an angle to the horizontal plane and that creates the illusion.
Thats a lot of crane to unload this small a thing, but the crane was already in place to take the Swedish Americas cup boat in and out of the water. OK so some overkill is justified.
The head on view shows the arrangement of the verticals.
And here it is sitting in the water. Even with a little wind blowing, it heeled way over. More ballast, I would think. I also cant picture something this small operating autonomously in the ocean with breaking waves. Snap that thing in pieces in no time and bend the heck out of any metal. But I might be wrong.
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