Let me know when you're certain there are no bugs...
Yeah, that’s something I’d love to hear from a gear manufacturer…no, wait:
WARNING
This computer has bugs. Although we haven’t found them all yet, they are there.
As for the Genesis 600, I'm loving it. Took it on a hunt for a large plane wreck off the Mokes Saturday morning and drove it all over a ledge in the 150'-200' range, and aside from managing to get myself lost in one Hell of a hurry it did everything I asked it to without giving me any headaches. Ditto for some recreational wrecks and reefs on Sunday.
Cover huge expanses of bottom at near full throttle carrying doubles and multiple stages while looking for a big tail section? Did that. Dial it back to a crawl while checking out interesting bits of wreckage, black coral, and ulua caves? Did that too. Drive faster through a corridor then slow down to make a sharp left turn, power back up a bit to cross a hold, then drop back for a narrow hatch into the engine room? Yep, not a problem. I'm still not 100% sold on the infinitely variable speed control from an 'executing the plan' perspective, because it makes nailing a given power consumption setting harder, but there's no denying that it's extremely easy to drive an exact route with it. The short nose and Kort nozzle's narrow thrust column all probaby help with how easy it is to turn, too.
Despite the 91lb thrust TBM 2011 says it puts out, between the soft-start feature and offset battery mass/offset trim weights, at full throttle it feels less painful on the crotch than the Magnus and didn't require as much clockwise correction to compensate for the rotational torque. In terms of battery capacity vs. real world use, despite putting about about 50 minutes of heavy throttle use on it Saturday and an hour and a half or so of everything from crawling to full throttle on it Sunday, the charge cycle times indicate I wasn't burning more than 60% or so of total capacity. With some throttle discipline, I have no problem believing that the tiny little 600 can give me something close to the 5.6mi cruise range TBM claims it did in dry suit/single tank configuration.
Not much else to report: it's tiny (2 feet long, 34lbs), it's got nearly unmatched cruise range and peak thrust, I don't have to open it up to charge it (plug the charger into the nose wetconn, pull the locking strips so it's not a LiIon pipebomb should something go wrong, and off it goes), and maintenance is as easy as pulling the prop off and dropping the whole thing in some fresh water to soak. When I have $4k to blow I'll buy a set of 1500 batteries/nose for it and see about the 14mi cruise range...once I get a CCR to allow me to actually enjoy that kind of runtime. Though I'll have a grand time shipping it back to the mainland from HI.
Also, my whole scooter buying process was heavily assisted by the 2011 TBM report and I gave them a donation recently after thinking about how much help their work was to me. Anyone else who uses their data should think about doing the same. I'd love to see a 2014 TBM happen and let me know what's out there in terms of DPV options.
