Thanks everyone for the important knowledge you have given me. Cheers Spence.

Great start can't wait to see what comes next ,I bet you have learnt some new skill 👍
Phil

Hi Spence:
Although I have no experience with jet thrusters, I do sweat the paint issues all the time.
You can always use an oil base paint over water based paints. You just can't do the reverse without priming the oil based paint with a decent flat oil based or alkyd primer.
However, should you apply a water based paint finish coat that you cannot part with, you can always seal it with an exterior clear spar varnish.
The trick to this whole situation is to do duplicate tests on scrap wood. I've always found the test work is the best way to go and worth the extra effort. It'll save you any disastrous mistakes where you have to strip off a whole hull of mistakes.😉

Have used several of the smaller ones. They work well and have never had a debris ingress issue.

I assume you are talking about a water jet? They can suck debris in if the lake has plenty of weed etc. but you'd usually have a grille on the water inlet and avoid waters like that anyway even if using a model with a prop.

I've painted the house with oil and water based paints with no problem after thorough preparation and using primer and undercoat. Preference is for oil based if you want a good gloss.

Expensive but I use International Yacht Paint - if it's good enough for the real thing it's good enough for my models!

You can get solvent based household gloss paint e.g. Dulux Trade from Dulux Decorator Centres but that's expensive as well and the smallest tin size is 1 litre which is too much for most models.