While it takes a lot less energy to keep a boat on the plane than it does to get it up on the plane, I don't beleive that 30W is enough to keep any boat capable of carrying that amount of ballast on the plane so you should be looking at displacement hulls, not planing hulls.
If you are interested in speed at all longer and thinner hulls are more efficient for displacement boats so look at frigate warships, or a canoes.
I don't know where you will be using it, but given the high cost of the setup if it will be open or flowing water, I'd advise using a name brand radio with an RF protocol that covers all of the band and has great interference suppression like Futaba or Jetti, if its near the university buildings it may even be worth staying away from the 2.4ghz band to avoid the pollution from thousands of wifi devices. Or maybe you have a rowing lake at university, and a runaway doesn't matter at all in which case something like a flysky gt3 may be worth a punt as it is massively cheaper and they do well if the environment isn't too noisy.
The Futaba BLS551 servo is good but totally unnecessary expense for your project, id go to your local hobby shop and but the cheapest standard size digital servo they have from a name brand like Hitec, Futaba, Multiplex, Savox or Spektrum, if you don't mind spending a little more, an upgrade to a waterproof servo like the Hitec D646WP would offer piece of mind in case of any disasters, but with 2K of electrics inside it, a servo will be the least of your worries, and waterproofing the whole boat would be my priority over the servo.
For the ESC if you use a surface radio I'd go with a car ESC for forward and reverse which not all boat ESCs have, the Tamiya 3.5t brushless motor is capable of pulling a fair amount of current at very high revs though, and for a boat and especially a displacement boat you will want a lot less RPM than that,
I'm not too familiar with displacement boats and props so surely others will offer better advice here, but I'd guess you want 2000KV or lower, maybe a Hobbywing Axe 1400kv combo.
It may be worth noting that while the suggested components list you showed list a brushless motor and ESC, all the photos in the manual are of a brushed motor and ESC, not the ones listed.
The battery suggestion seems reasonable, the photo in the manual is of a 2s hardcase LiPo pack which ties in with the 7.4v suggestion.
The 2 pin connectors you show are Tamiya ones, you may be able to find some 2s batterys with these on as they were the standard many years ago and i would guess that some still use them, but they are not very good and the industry has thankfully moved away from them, so buying adapters or replacing them with your choice of connectors may be easier. Deans plugs, and 4mm gold bullets are common for RC car batteries these days, the big multipin one looks like a similar format to Tamiya Mini connectors but with way more pins, its not something I've seen before, but as it only has 30W going through it I expect that its fine.
Chassis, tyres, tube and hubcaps are not applicable to boats
Paul Upton-Taylor, Greased Weasel Racing.
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Originally Posted by lohring
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