this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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[–] YoiksAndAway@lemmy.zip 48 points 2 months 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.

[–] xploit@lemmy.world 27 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months 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.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

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

[–] Samskara@sh.itjust.works 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Both lived and were not seriously injured.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 2 months 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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[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 16 points 2 months ago (3 children)

200 mph (322kph)

Everything but metric.

[–] CmdrShepard42@lemm.ee 17 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Am I missing something here? KPH is metric.

[–] lime@feddit.nu 12 points 2 months 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.

[–] CmdrShepard42@lemm.ee 6 points 2 months 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.

[–] Sconrad122@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months 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

[–] neons@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 months 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.

[–] OCATMBBL@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

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

[–] neons@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 2 months ago

kph is just a stupid way of saying km/h

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[–] ElcaineVolta@kbin.melroy.org 11 points 2 months ago (7 children)

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

[–] Jumuta@sh.itjust.works 12 points 2 months ago

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

[–] CmdrShepard42@lemm.ee 11 points 2 months 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.

[–] IndustryStandard@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago

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

[–] grue@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months 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.
[–] Goretantath@lemm.ee 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] CmdrShepard42@lemm.ee 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

What do you do if you run out of electricity while out on the water? At least with an EV you can get out and walk but that's a different story on a boat.

[–] Halcyon@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 2 months ago

Same what you do when your boat runs out of gasoline? Doesn't matter what powers your engine if you don't watch your tank or battery level you will have a problem.

Apart from that: This is about racing boats. They're never alone somewhere on the open sea.

[–] lilsolar@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago

"STOP HAVING FUN!!"

[–] burgersc12@mander.xyz 0 points 2 months 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.

[–] froh42@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

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

[–] BigMikeInAustin@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

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

/s

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 months ago

What's a crash win?

[–] FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 1 points 2 months ago

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

Glad they’re ok.

[–] ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 months 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.

[–] Undearius@lemmy.ca 14 points 2 months 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.

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months 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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