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Hello Emile, I had not seen the E-Jet models before. Thanks for the heads up. I hope I can acquire one of these to test out. HBOI and Schilling have patents on ring thrust designs here in the US, so they might have to work out a deal with them, to sell them over here, if they have not already. I'm a fan of this type of thruster, so I hope the E-Jet models work well, and are reasonably priced. I would like to see more data on how they power these and what they are using for bearings. The Schilling prototypes tried some different bearing configurations and had trouble with them seizing up when they put them in there test tanks with sand being stirred up in the tanks. So they went with some very strong earth magnets they acquired from NASA for bearings. This is one reason the price was so high on these. Also a number of Schilling employees that got to close to the thruster with there there wallets and watches had to get new credit cards and watches. It's interesting that E-Jet is using a three bladed design. I was told by my friend that worked for Schilling designing the ring thrusters, that a three bladed design was more efficient then the five bladed design they went with, but that they had some balance issues that made them go with the five bladed configuration. Perhaps E-Jet was able to figure out a good solution. I would expect that carbon fiber blades would be good for the ring thrusters in the future. In fact one US company was trying to do just that. But so far I've not seen any real models to be produces by them. This is the link Frank was talking about showing the five bladed Schilling ring thrusters in Lake Tahoe, California some years back. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No0pzwOLabk Here is a video showing how to reduce thrust losses by changing the angle of your shrouded thrusters. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzjFEe47bzA&feature=related Regards, Brent Hartwig
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