quote:
couple of questions: is it intended to be human-operated? what sort of water needs to be traversed? what restrictions are there on the solar arrays, size of the boat, and are you supposed to design an electric-powered propulsion yourself, or you're just responsible for putting all the major pieces together?

The Race will be on Missouri River from Kansas City to St Charles (st Louis ). LINK to pics of kayak race on same course

Just have to put together the pieces. At least one person has to be on board. Can innovate or purchase and bolt together.

The link about about the car race teams listed all of the contacts for the components to build a car. Thanks a lot to the poster who posted that site. I spent a lot of time reading the how to articles last night. Not surprised that team won, their motor/controller cost $15k. Other listed motors were around 1,000 to $1,500.

The trick to this event, is effecient use of power and the ability to generate and store enough power to get you through the night as the race doesn't stop at night. I have no idea if that's possible. To meet the time requirements, the boat would have to travel at least 10MPH. The river current will give you around 2 MPH so the boat would need to be able to create, store and operate on enough power to generate the additional 8 MPH even through the 10 hours of darkness. Of course, if the boat is fast enough during the day, it could just drift at night other than having power to navigate around wing dikes, bridge structures and channel markers.

Edit:
Better views of river in this video

This post was edited on 5/19/14 at 9:24 am

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Posted by TexasTiger01

Lake Houston

Member since Nov 2013

3215 posts

Posted on 5/19/14 at 9:28 am to tigers win2

quote:
twin-hull catamaran

This is a really efficient hull choice. My only concern is any type of tunnel hull boat does not become very efficient until you acheive a certain speed to create enough lift to reduce wetted surace area. At 10MPH in a heavy boat this may be an issue. I would focus on a boat design that would plane easily for the amount of weight and power involved.

What length boat do you have in mind?

Type of drive system?

For this to be sucessful, boat setup and weight will be a major factor. Allison and Hydrostream have made some small lightweight hulls over the years that planed with very little power.

I've built/raced boats in my past life and have done alot with battery powered gadgets.... I could offer advice from afar....