Quote:
Originally Posted by Nauset
Space shuttle fuel consumed in a launch: 3.5 million pounds.
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Rule of thumb on gasoline consumption is .4 lbs of fuel per HP per hour.
So a 1700HP boat would use *approximately* 680 lbs of fuel per hour at peak power output (gasoline being roughly 6lbs/gallon, so about 113 gallons/hour). With a top speed of 130MPH, the boat could go end to end on Winni in about 9 minutes (provided there are no kayakers to maneuver around).
So, after about 5,100 hours of running at full throttle (34,000 lake passes) this 1700HP boat would use as much fuel as a space shuttle launch.
However, the shuttle is a very large and heavy craft, and is much different than the SpaceShipTwo that is carrying civilian astronauts on their brief ride into "space". The launch mechanism is also much different, SS2 probably only burns a few hundred thousand pounds of fuel. I don't know the exact number (they don't list it on their website), but use 400,000lbs as a rough guess (being generous, that's about 1/10th what the shuttle uses). That's ~580 hours of 1700HP boat running. Figure an engine rebuild at 1,000 hrs (again, being very generous), and the fact that it's not very likely the boat can sustain peak HP output for more than a couple of minutes on Winni...
On the other hand, the spaceship does not produce any wake
