this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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[–] [email protected] 48 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

Admittedly, I don't know much about modern speedboats, but the full flip probably saved their lives. In the old days, flipping onto your head at damn near 200 mph was certain death.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

Yea that flip and rotation definitely saved them, you can see in the video they slow down drastically in the air while the top of the boat was pointing mostly forward, although they likely also experienced some drastic gforce changes as it happened.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Yeah, I was gonna say, did the pilot live?

Good number of hydroplane/powerboat deaths/maimings over the years...

[–] Samskara 14 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Both lived and were not seriously injured.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

And that is what I would describe as the only kind of miracle I believe can actually happen.

Roughly on par with 'bailed out of an airplane, crashed through some trees, landed in a snowbank, only suffered a few fractures and actually lived.'

Something like that happened a few times in WW2.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

200 mph (322kph)

Everything but metric.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Am I missing something here? KPH is metric.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

"kph" is an americanization. the unit is km/h. i'm assuming the commenter did not know this since the first abbreviation is not used it most languages.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

Fair enough. I Googled it just to double-check before posting, but Google isn't going to tell you whether terminology is regionally correct or not.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

Americans hate metric so much that they'd rather use metric!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Maybe this is an SI purist and want to see meters per second or nothing? That would be silly because KPH is well used across the metric world, of course

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

yeah, but the US is one of the only country in the world that writes it as kph. most countries write it as km/h. Which can be confusing.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago

kph is just a stupid way of saying km/h

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

And a 'significant figures' failure too.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 weeks ago (7 children)

k, it's time to wind down the whole we're-just-burning-fossil-fuels-for-fun stuff now.

[–] Jumuta 12 points 4 weeks ago

i doubt the actual motorsports are the biggest carbon emissions of stuff like this

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago

A lot of these racing applications are what drive innovations in power and efficiency in the rest of the automotive field since they're constantly improving engines to squeeze as much power out of them as they can. Banning this stuff will have little to no impact on pollution and just needlessly piss a bunch of people off, driving allies away from the cause.

It's like the whole plastic straw ban that achieved nothing and made a bunch of people look like fools. Meanwhile, giant corporations are packaging items in single-use plastic packaging and using 10,000x as much plastic with nary a peep from those politicians' grandstanding over straws. Furthermore, every paper straw I've ever gotten has been wrapped in a plastic bag.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago

Running boats like this for 10 seconds costs nothing compared to a mega yacht.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

I mean, i'm certainly ok with a fully electric motorboat

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 weeks ago

Check out SailGP. It's got some flaws, but they did actually manage to design a sailboat race that goes fast enough to actually be interesting to watch in real-time.

flaws

  • I have my doubts that it's as eco-friendly as they claim, since they still use fossil fuels for support boats, shipping the sailboats across the world between events, etc.
  • It's pretty new and seems a little underfunded, so the production values and commentating can be a bit rough around the edges.
  • They try to make it accessible (e.g. by reporting speeds in kph instead of knots), but it's still got a whiff of yacht-club elitism to it.
[–] lilsolar 1 points 3 weeks ago

"STOP HAVING FUN!!"

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 weeks ago

That time was like 30 years ago. Now we can either stop using them altogether and have a bad time, or we can keep using them and have a slightly more bad time.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago

Eh, anyone can do that mid-air. It takes skill to do it quarter-air.

/s

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

There were two seoarate incidents. Mark Webber and another guy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

What's a crash win?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

Is this the speedboat equivalent of doing a wheelie across the finish line on a bike?

Glad they’re ok.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I guess these guys have never heard of ground effect or air compressing at high speed.

I'm guessing none of them want to admit to these effects if you want to keep a propeller in the water the whole time.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Those effects are key to the design of these boats. They're essentially a wing.

Water has a lot more drag than air, so the more the boat is out of the water, the faster it can go.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

Though it makes me wonder why they don't use actual wings to maintain control over the boat when it goes too far out of the water. Why isn't the ideal basically a plane that has a propeller sticking down into the water?

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