Yes, but as I said, the company I linked too, seems to have much lower maintenance requirements which lowers the long term expense compared to other gyros. The expense of maintaining some gyros, as mentioned in other posts, is very expensive.
Am kind of curious how they want to lower maintenance requirements. In a gyro the bearings are basically the achilles heel. For a gyro to work fine you either need a very heavy weight or a very high speed. Both options put enormous loads on the bearings, hence the reason for the maintenance.
Some companies now came up with the idea to lower the rpm's and the weight, which indeed means less maintenance, but at the same time that gyro is not going to perform like the high speed, high weight gyros.
For some boats, the energy requirements will be a problem, for other boats, not so much. On advantage of gyros is that they are contained IN the boat and thus cannot snag lines, be damaged in groundings, etc. For some, this is a big concern.
In my opinion only charter boats or people who don't know anything other than running the generator 24/7 will not mind, however.........if that gyro is eating up 2/3 of the capacity of the generator, you are not going to be happy. And to increase generator capacity just to be able to run your gyro....I don't think that is the way to go.
Paravanes are pretty cheap to build and maintain but they do burn fuel in use, can snag stuff, and if one is concerned about air draft, paravanes are a problem. If one needs/wants stabilization at anchor flopper stoppers are an option.
Flopper stoppers are definitely an option if your boat can handle them. I wish my boat would have been able to accept them and to perform well, but that was not the case. Same goes for paravanes.
All of the forms of stabilization have good and bad points. Which to use depends on the boat, how it will be used, and what one wants/can spend for the stabilization.
I agree that stabilization depends for a large part on what you can spend, but as I found out during my research, i was surprised to find basically identical cost for all forms of stabilization. The difference was perhaps 5000 USD and that is something which I find hard to believe. How can it be that completely different forms of stabilization in the end all have the same price ? I have my suspicions, but have to be careful.
As for the different forms of stabilization I don't share your opinion that they are all identical. I can clearly see a pattern. In the old days it were the paravanes and from that came the hydraulic fins. Worked perfect for decades (and still do for the larger vessels), but development has brought us alternatives. First there were the pneumatic fins, but I don't really see them as an option. The idea was ok, but the enormous compressor and storage tank quickly showed the flaws in that idea.
After that came the gyros and the idea in itself is perfect, but the practical problems make it difficult. When you build your boat around it then it is an option, but for existing boats I don't see gyros as an option. Too big, too much space needed, too much electricity usage and long spool up time.
And then it was waiting for electrical solutions such as rotors and eventually the fins. Especially for the market segment that most of us are in (up to about 60') the electrical solution if perfect. It doesn't take up a lot of space, does not require a lot of maintenance and it offers more than what hydraulic fins will ever be able to do. In a couple of years we will see many producers coming up with electrical solutions for the smaller boats.
Reason for that is simple, only electrical fins give you the ability to offer underway and on anchor stability with low operating cost.
The one thing that I wonder about is why stabilization is never offered on new builds. Some boats are well over 1 million USD and still don't have stabilization, that just does make sense to me.
