Want to get a boat that makes you look like a Nintendo character come to life? While the image may appear like it came straight out of some child’s fancy, believe me when I say those are two future captains of supertankers riding a $250,000 replica of the real thing.
How that boat can cost $250,000 is beyond my understanding, although they do use it to train students at the Warsash Maritime Academy in Southampton to pilot huge supertankers that carry one of the most dangerous cargo on the high seas – highly-flammable oil. As fun as they look like, these “baby supertankers” are probably not the kind of toys you want to mess with (and not as fun to ride, just basing from the look on that guy’s face).
The replica supertankers, as it turns out, are very hard to control, effectively mimicking the possible difficulties captains will face when maneuvering their gargantuan watercrafts across the water. They come with a full set of electronics that can be commanded to fail (via RC) just as they could on an actual oil tanker, to effectively train the students to deal with crisis.
Reading about that, of course, just makes those under-sized boats so much more desirable. Can you imagine playing on the beach with this thing with your friends, forcing it to encounter accidents and watching the ensuing struggle? I’d pay good money to see that, though I suspect the quarter-million dollars is a little out of my budget for the moment.
[via DailyMail]