New details have emerged on the stealthy fast attack craft from Juliet Marine known as theGhost. This prototype is the only one of its kind (yet!). It looks—and runs—like something out of the next GI Joe flick, according to the folks at Bloomberg Businessweek who recently got a closer look. Eat your heart out, Batboat.
The Ghost is the brainchild of medical tech millionaire Gregory Sancoff, who designed the ship himself and has spent more than $15 million developing and building this initial prototype at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine.
The ship moves through the water like an ocean-going X-Wing fighter. The 38-foot long main cabin rests atop a pair of 12-foot tall struts which, when moving at speed, prop the cabin above the water like a hydrofoil. What’s more, the struts swivel at their base, allowing them to be raised and lowered depending on the water depth. They’re sharpened along the leading edge as well to slice through submerged debris (and unsuspecting sealife).
At the other end of each strut, a 62-foot long tube houses a 2,000HP gas turbine engine spinning two front-mounted propellers. These tubes also eject a pocket of air from the front to generate a supercavitation effect that reduces the ship’s drag coefficient by a factor of 900.
“It’s such a smooth ride, you can sit there and drink your coffee going through six-foot swells,” Sancoff told Bloomberg Businessweek. This technology has not gone unnoticed by the Pentagon, which has made overtures of purchasing a more refined iteration of the $10 million machines should the current model pass its upcoming speed tests. Between this and the M80 Stiletto, high seas baddies won’t stand a chance.
