Re: OOC Thread
BTW, the chinook engine didn't really register when I read it... Mostly because I didn't quite remember what a chinook engine really is.
For those who are not versed in physics, a chinook engine is a power plant that can provide heat and electricity for a small village.
I'm not kidding: those things range in power from 1.6MW to over 3MW.
The average European house uses at most 3kW, so even accounting for a 20% efficiency in power conversion (1.6MW/5 = 320kW of electric power) you can hook 100 houses to the weakest chinook engine, and still have power to spare.
So, when I read the specifications, I tried to imagine the effect one of those things would have when mounted on a boat that was designed to handle maybe, and I said *maybe*, one tenth that power.
Let me tell you, it wasn't a pretty picture.
Now, I am willing to consider, for the sake of discussion, that John is (or knows) an engineering genius, who was able to constrain this 2MW aircraft beast so that it behaves exactly, but exactly, like a 200kW marine engine - because if it doesn't, it will probably kill everyone on board.
The question is: why? Why go through all that trouble, when there are so many disadvantages and no benefit to speak of?
The engine is expensive to buy and hard to maintain, its spare parts are difficult to find, its tolerances are so small that adapting something else to work as a spare part is basically impossible, and last but not least, it guzzles so much aircraft fuel that its range would be significantly smaller than that of a plain, boring marine engine, not to mention harder to refuel. And the extra power cannot be used anyway, since it would tear the boat apart!
It seems to be a near-perfect example of "awesome but impractical"...