Obviously the conditions here do comprehensively exceed the designs operational envelope, as in scale proportion to the model, the waves must be I guess around 10-20 metres in size. However it’s interesting to understand the designs ultimate limits.
The model is built to a scale of fourteen to one, and this equals 20 metres in real life size.
Later, by slowing down the video, so that it matches the speed of the waves and motion of the boat from real life footage, taken during our own sea trials in similar surf conditions, we can gain some insight into how the design might behave in waves.
As one would predict taken directly head on, the waves are survivable and didn’t present too much of a problem, relatively speaking of course.
However, as it would be in real life, getting hit by a big breaking wave from astern is best avoided, as it would completely overwhelm the model. In this situation you would be just depending on the boats ultimate stability to survive, which on the T-2000’s catamaran hull design is luckily, pretty considerable.
We fitted a GoPro to the model capturing some cool footage.