Sail Drone, further thoughts

In my original post on the sail drone, I expressed some pessimism that the thing would work.  In the meantime, the saildrone people put up some more information about their project and their designers.  Seems like they have enough experience to make the sail drone work.  One of the interesting things about the ocean is that the bigger the thing floating on it is, the more vulnerable it is to the forces of storms.  Small things like plastic bottles or coconuts can cross oceans with impunity.  So as long as a drone is small enough, it is probably impervious to damage. 
Still some problems remain for any autonomous drone.  The main one would seem to be collisions with ships and land masses.  Autonomy is one thing, avoiding collisions is another and adds complexity to the design.  The other problem with anything floating on water and containing electronic gear is water proofing.  As anyone who has ever bough a waterproof anything knows, waterproof is an optimistic term.  Water seems to be able to outwit almost any sealing technology so far invented.  Perhaps the most reliable technology is still the cork.  But we will see. I am keeping my eye on the sail drone website.

Sail Drone

While driving to work a few days back I noticed some people hoisting a small red airplane looking thing from a trailer.  As the lettering on the wing of the thing indicated, it was a saildrone. When I got home I went to their website http://saildrone.com. There wasn't anything there except a home page, but they have since fleshed it out some.  Anyway, some pictures of the saildrone.

 Here they are unloading the saildrone from its trailer.  At a distance it looks like the tail is at right angles to the main wing but that's an optical illusion.  The horizontal spar that the tail is mounted on is actually at an angle to the horizontal plane and that creates the illusion.

 That's a lot of crane to unload this small a thing, but the crane was already in place to take the Swedish Americas cup boat in and out of the water.  OK so some overkill is justified.

 The head on view shows the arrangement of the verticals.

And here it is sitting in the water.  Even with a little wind blowing, it heeled way over.  More ballast, I would think.  I also can't picture something this small operating autonomously in the ocean with breaking waves.  Snap that thing in pieces in no time and bend the heck out of any metal.  But I might be wrong.