Skip to main content

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

The Tetrahedron Superyacht defies gravity and looks like a Star Destroyer

In the not-so-distant future, anyone navigating the warm waters off the Spanish island of Ibiza may notice a particularly odd vessel sharing the sea with them. Shaped like a pyramid and reminiscent of something Fox Mulder yearns to believe in, London-based designer Jonathan Schwinge‘s Tetrahedron Superyacht is the luxury boat of the future. As is typically seen with concept vehicles, however, this futuristic ship exists solely as a batch of beautifully rendered images and it’s not entirely known if Schwinge and his team ever intend to actually construct their otherworldly creation.

And like the stuff of dreams, the Tetrahedron Superyacht would essentially levitate on water during operation due to a vertical strut that’s attached to a submerged, torpedo-like hull. Dubbed the HYSWAS hull — or Hydrofoil Small Waterplane Area Ship — the Tetra would rise out of the water as it gains speed thanks to side-mounted adjustable hydrofoils. While stationary, the hull sits retracted into the body of the ship, which keeps the vessel floating on the surface of the water. It’s not until it begins to accelerate that the strut lengthens and sends the Tetra into its levitating state.

“This hull form has two working ‘waterlines’ for its operation,” Schwinge says on his website. “At low speed, the Tetrahedron sits gently on three underbelly hulls. At high-speed the hydrofoils rotate on the lower submerged hull, causing the effect of mysteriously raising the triangle out of the water.”

Though operation of the vehicle sits somewhere between science fiction and reality, the renderings show that the stationary Tetra can boast of everything you’d ever associate with the yachting life. Comfortable loungers line each of the vessel’s open-air decks, ladders give passengers easy access for a quick dip, and a long dinner table on the bow makes it easy to enjoy dinner during a picturesque sunset. However, it’s not the high life Schwinge wanted to show off in creating his innovative new design.

“Long distances are achievable with reduced out-of-water drag and stormy ocean conditions would incur virtually no slamming,” Schwinge points out. “Improved efficiency is driven by elevated hydrofoil propulsion and would be an inherent performance benefit of this type of design.”

Related Offer: Buy a Samsung G7 and receive a FREE Gear VR at AT&T

So no matter what conditions a Tetra Superyacht finds itself in, the vessel would travel with absolute ease. Moreover, Schwinge says the Tetra would boast speeds of roughly 17.2 miles per hour during take-off and up to 43.7 miles per hour while in its full, above-water form. It would also have a range of around 3,000 nautical miles. If built, the ship would consist of carbon fiber and duplex stainless steel and would likely be capable of reasonably accommodating 10 total riders — six passengers and four crew members.

The likelihood of Schwinge’s pyramid superyacht seeing an actual body of water remains incredibly low, but hey, the world’s billionaires can dream, can’t they?

Editors' Recommendations

Rick Stella
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Rick became enamored with technology the moment his parents got him an original NES for Christmas in 1991. And as they say…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more