Hi hanermo,
As has become customary in this group, I believe apples are being compared with rocks. I can think of much worse things that much more excessively-rich a-holes have put on the water, such as the billion-dollar, 537-foot "yacht" (with two helipads and pools, one of which is glass-bottomed over a disco, all of which are populated by scantily-clad females with Daddy issues) built by a Russian steel/"oil-garch" just so it would be half a meter longer than the next-largest such ship.
I've asked for access to the construction details for the Vaka and, if that can be obtained, the costs of quantity production could be evaluated. The $5.6 million number certainly includes a lot of one-time, non-recurring engineering (NRE - a term with which you may be familiar, given your handle), particularly since they were blending traditional and modern design and construction elements. Also, support for this effort has been going on back to 1976, when the first of such boats, Hokule'a, was first sailed between island groups thousands of miles apart using only traditional navigation techniques by the elder expert Pius Mau Piailug and his protoge Nainoa Thompson.
Having sailed and examined the boats up-close with an ocean engineer's jaundiced eye, I can say that the design has been optimized for manufacturability as well as extreme seaworthiness. I believe any random subset of this Yahoo Group, the size of the team that manufactured these boats, could readily do the same, once the processes are understood. The hard part has already been done, and the more mundane tasks of reproduction remain. There's also a lot to be said about the fuel savings of these boats over the typical ancient inter-island ICE-powered craft that service those places - the Vaka can't possibly be any slower or less reliable.
If the various islands specialized in building most of the components locally from commodity materials, especially with low-cost and highly-motivated and enthusiastic labor, the per-hull costs could be substantially reduced. Plus, future Vaka will primarily be used for inter-island trips within island groups in tropical conditions, so, most won't need to be built with all of the elements these first-generation Vaka need for a much longer, punishing voyage.
One of the primary reasons for the voyage is to help the participants prove to themselves that they could accomplish something so daunting and daring, and they've done that, in spades. This isn't just a stunt, and I'll challenge you to duplicate it, but, you'd better closely look at footage of 30-foot seas and 50-knot sustained winds to see what that looks like on an essentially open-decked, 72-foot boat, much less what that feels like. The kids on these boats have grown immensely just in the past few months from this experience, and they're an inspiration not just to their home-island peers, but, to every kid they're coming into contact with visiting places they couldn't have dreamt of a couple of years ago. The money spent on this voyage is on a par with what we spend on underprivileged kids here over the same period, and we don't have nearly as much to show for it.
This isn't just a one-shot, flash-in-the-pan effort - it's taken years just to prepare for and execute this voyage, and there is a long-term plan for the out-year efforts. It will be very interesting to see how this unfolds, and it's going to be especially interesting to see what happens with the electric drive components if the number of these boats increases substantially. We'll have an earlier idea if the technical details become available.
All the Best,
Jim
--- In
electricboats@yahoogroups.com, "\"hanermo\" - CNC 6-axis Designs" <gcode.fi@...> wrote:
>
> It is cool, but another public stunt by rich men.
> Did you note 800.000 $ / boat. For 7. So 5.6 M$.
>
> This has *nothing* to do with being useful, or teaching people skills,
> etc etc.
> Anyone can do anything in the "order custom components", and "money no
> object" bracket.
>
> I don´t mean to take away from the sailing accomplishment, but if they
> had done this with all volunteer labour, materials and say 800.000 for
> the 7, now that would have been an accomplishment.
> All this means is that "you cannot get usable green stuff in an aconomic
> oackage" which is complete nonsense, imo.
>
> Lovely story though. Pretty boats.
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