Hi Brooks --

I lived in Mungumry one summer. I enjoyed it a lot, but I never got too close to the water 'cause I was affraid of the snakes down in the river.

Anyhoo, your experience kinda supports my idea that what kind of power should depend on what kind of boat I think... in a scale military ship, you get more floatation that you know what to do with... a well built boat will nearly always need balast to bring it down to the waterline, so in that usage, the excess weight of cheap lead-acid batterries is an advantage and they store enough energy to run a couple of motors for as long as the radio batteries will last -- or longer.

Glow power is tough, especially for a boat that's not real fast, because of the need for a lot of cooling... but it's an engineering problem like anything else... it can be mastered pretty well if you fell that it's worht your time to mess with it. I'm sure most people would rather be enjoying running the boat rather than spend lots of time working on the cooling system.