High-Speed Marine Craft

High-Speed Marine Craft groups vessels engineered to travel through or above the water well beyond a displacement hull's ordinary speed. The class covers the hydrofoil, which lifts its hull clear of the water on submerged foils, the hovercraft, which rides on a cushion of air above the water's surface, and the personal watercraft, a small high-speed recreational craft a rider sits or stands astride. Wikipedia's High-speed craft article identifies the hydrofoil and the hovercraft as the earliest high-speed civilian water vessels, predating the catamaran and monohull fast-ferry designs that later became more common; this invention class gathers those lift-based high-speed designs together with the smaller personal watercraft that shares the same high-speed, planing-hull design goal.