The yahoo group has been active for more than ten years. There is ongoing discussion, if it should be moved at all, here or elsewhere.
There is definitely good reason to back up the yahoo forum on another web platform. Over the years it has become a (very messy) treasure trove of AWES ideas. Waiver … there’s a lot of crap too.
There were schemes ( Like http://www.personalgroupware.com/purchase.htm ) for exporting complete yahoo forum archives into a .csv and importing them into other forum formats. (Best imported into an “old Yahoo Forum messages” heading)
Exporting the membership list and inviting participation elsewhere probably breaks all the new data handling regs… so an invite posted and re-posted on the old forum might work to attract a quorum membership.
Not sure how you imported the twitter data today… was that just a straight post from Twitter to your discourse group from one app or the other… It may be beneficial to have an area or page with auto-imported / populated content from relevant twitter feeds or lists. Such as https://twitter.com/rodread/lists/airborne-wind-energy
again … once established … posting invites to membership on twitter may help.
IFTTT is handy for auto porting new material and cross-linking around the web.
Edit the wikipedia page to include your forum.
Very disappointed the reddit/r/airbornewindenergy was locked… What?? Have written to them again.
Would be very good to have a new discussion ground actually succeed.
I have downloaded and will export the whole yahoo group (about 25k messages) with personalgroupware to html. If everyone is ok with it I would like to load it up somewhere. That should be fairly searchable. It’s a bit of an effort since I’m only using the test version so I won’t do it for csv as well but if you do it I’ll load that up as well.
Here’s one file as an example: [edit: deadlink]
The twitter data was just manual link posting. There are such fancy things as plugins and apis, but I haven’t looked into that.
IFTTT seems like something very useful. Never heard about it before. Might come in handy.
Editing the wikipedia has been hard according to Udo Zillmann. So I’ll wait with that until the forum has gained traction to make sure the link stays up.
I’ve also messaged the subreddit.
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The yahoo group archive can be temporarily found here: Dropbox
Unfortunately, when not logged in, the html is shown as source code.
If you want to mention messages, please link to the original yahoo goup. I would also recommend quoting the relevant excerpt.
In your preferences you can activate a mailing list mode.
When activated you’ll get a message every time someone posts something and can reply via mail.
@JoeFaust
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There has been so much activity in the yahoo group yesterday. I did find it incomprehensible. Is anyone following and can provide a summary?
Some discussions on Betz limit and power available in the wind are carried on Yahoo group in addition to the usual subjects. As the Betz limit concern and its implications are important and not easy to understand (for me too), mulling them can do move forward.
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Despite loads of activity on the messaging board, this forum has been just as productive today.^^
I’m glad we’ve got all those features like threads and quoting and editing.
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That’s a funny clip!
I always feel like I’m wading through a bog trying to navigate that forum.
Any small forum has the chance to develop into that though. If I present to the forum an idea I’ve worked on for a long time and it is quickly and efficiently put down by the people replying, it’s inevitable I’m either going to reconsider my life choices, or convince myself they don’t understand the idea. Since I have thought about the idea for so long, the latter is the more likely outcome. It’s scary putting yourself out there, and easy to withdraw from the discussion. You need a lot of maturity on all sides to make it work.
Here is a wish I have: more people joining the forum. More eyes and more perspectives usually leads to a better picture of the thing under discussion. And more activity by more people makes it more interesting to come back.
I’d like that very much. I’m promoting the forum when appropriate but don’t go out of my way to do so. It’s pretty much hidden from search engines. The terms “airborne wind energy forum” do not lead here. Maybe when I get the awesystems.info site online that will improve the situation.
I’m a layperson myself and would really prefer to have a pool of active experts and maybe even a recognized authority or two. Roland Schmehl was on the someawe.org forum.
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The Yahoo Group moved back, given over-moderation concerns.
Roland pops up early on AWE Forums, typically preoccupied with trivial publishing and formatting details, not ideas. Sadly, he is not the sort of public AWE expert to address open questions like these-
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How does a standard span-loaded LEI power-kite wing finally compare in power-to-weight with his PhD Thesis cantilever-wing LEI? (poorly)
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Was TUDelft and Saracenos’s Bell Kite habitat concept flyable under scaling law limits or was it a fantasy? (fantasy).
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Does he still believe his 2007 AWES reeling patent to be the one best architecture? (apparently so).
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What happened to the US AWEC corporation as its protested conference hosting monopoly somehow passed into his hands? (???)
Since Wubbo passed, unanswered questions like these run in the hundreds, centered on TUDelft’s ventures’ circle, as raised on the Old Forum. Defenders like Pierre imply venture capitalism secrecy is justified over academic candor (agreed only if the insiders down-select the best tech).
The world’s top kite technologists*, in general, tackle AWE questions with confidence or frank uncertainty. Like the Old Forum, the New Forum can count on them as a great community braintrust, on a question by question basis.
- AWE and kite super-experts and top sub-specialists like Culp, Lynn, Loyd, Hadzicki, Lang, Dunker, Faust, Lozano, Moore, North, Hably, Milanese, Ghivarello, Tracy, Kramer, German, Welty, Gomberg, Skinner, Jordan, Muller, Paelinck, etc.
With you being ~95% of the Yahoo Group, that will be true, if you decide so.^^
Meaning that Joe Faust, the admin of the Old Forum, decided not to shut it down, thankfully. By word count, Doug has been a major (>5%) poster. My posts tend shorter and many link to sources not covered here by anyone. Let no one think the Yahoo Group moved as imagined. Better two Forums on divergent priorities.
Roland makes a great job in a very difficult field.
The criticism is easy, the art is difficult.
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Wubbo did a better job at leading. Criticism of Roland is easy, by comparison.
Wubbo was not perfect, but both he and Doug rejected the LadderMill, no matter who was first.
Wubbo led me to his SpiderMill, and Doug’s ST seems to convince you. Go ahead and follow Doug and Roland then.
I never specifically “rejected” Laddermill, but just saw SuperTurbine™ as likely more efficient, simple, and straightforward. However I was quite excited when Wubbo came out with his version, and he had a catchy name for it. Then I was GREATLY disappointed that everyone involved turned out to have no ability and/or motivation to even try building a single laddermill prototype, that they would just go to buying and flying kites (kite-reeling) like the other 999,999 flies. Actually it totally “blew me away”, I mean, I had long seen the helplessness of modern people, especially in the all-talk-no-results world of improved wind turbines, but this was just unbelievable, with all those grad students, all the attention, resources, effortless instant assumed credibility, manpower, funding, etc. nobody could even build the most minimal prototype of laddermill using, say cocktail skewers, plastic bags, fishing line, ductape, and bicycle parts - whatever. No significant budget required. After seeing the fanfare devoted to laddermill, all those resources and enthusiasm, then nothing but excuses, like they had determined to have “a better idea”. Taking one giant step backwards…
Even though kite-reeling was so obvious it seemed unworthy of mention, while laddermill took kite-reeling to the next level and made it usable (steady-state). Well so we were supposed to believe everything they had said before was suddenly wrong, but they were still going to call it “laddermill”, still follow the guy who thought of it like the Pied Piper, while just going back to kite-flying? OMG! That’s when I just had to go with “idiots, idiots, idiots”. Hundreds of people unable to stay in the same page for even a single try - whoa!!! I’d say the only way to know if laddermill-type devices could work out is to try them. The way I see it, the first one might barely work, or not even work at all. Then someone sees a way to fix it and it barely works, then a few more adjustments and it works a bit better, etc. Lather, rinse, repeat. You don;t know ehere it could lead. That’s research. Even Einstein (supposedly) said “If we knew what we were doing they wouldn’t call it research:” There are multiple approaches to even a basic version. Nobody has tried any of them. Let me restate that: Nobody has BOTHERED to even try ANY of them. (Yet they kept the name for a while.) How could anyone know if they don’t try?! I don’t think it’s fair to “throw away” an entire design-direction of AWE possibilities, when out of thousands of flies - er um, I mean eager, enthusiastic people, (possibly even a few with actual talent) all the flies land on the same pile of s***. For one thing, to make that big of a deal over “laddermill”, as though it’s THE answer, then never even trying a single time, to me, shows a lack of basic intellectual integrity. It’s like their very first action was to lower themselves to the very bottom of basic honesty, like the “AWE-powered concert” of daveS, making huge, world-shaking claims, followed by absolutely nothing. To me it is weird that they still have a reputation at all. Just goes to show you, as in “The Wizard of Oz”, despite a lot of impressive-appearing fireworks, even the wizard himself ends up saying “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” So no, I did not “reject” it, just saw other configurations “seemed” more promising, more straightforward, easier to build and run, but that doesn’t mean there is nothing to laddermill. No such thing has been proven. It just means nobody has bothered to check it out. I can come up with a hundred promising configurations that nobody thinks of and certainly nobody bothers to try. Reminds me of a time in 1982 when I ran the SuperTurbine™ concept by my fluid mechanics professor at U.C. Irvine, whom I really liked and went to talk with in his office on a regular basis. I was like, OK these rotors we’ve been studying, what about stacking them at spaced intervals on the same driveshaft and offsetting it from the wind direction to greatly multiply output of a turbine of a given diameter? It’s like the old saying, “we lose a little on every sle but make it up in volume”, SuperTurbine’s skewed rotors “lose a little power at each rotor, but make it up with as many rotors as you want to use!” OMG!. He seemed unable to even come up with any reaction at all. His only comment on any invention I showed him was “nice drawings”. It was as though the only thing professors could understand was making simple things seem complicated through jumping right into endless mathematical formulae. I was like, “great, given these formulae, and given we know the answers, what can we do with this knowledge? Let’s see what we can build with all this knowledge!!!” How can we take the building blocks we have and build something? No reaction. If it’s not in “the curriculum”, they are just empty-headed. It made me realize, just being really smart and understanding a technical topic well, doesn’t make someone creative. Just like you are probably not going to find the next Jimi Hendrix leading the U.S. Marine Corps marching band - different strokes for different folks. There are regimented environments, then there is creativity. Not always found in the same place.
KiteLab Ilwaco and kPower Austin, having built and tested two laddermill prototypes, one based on small sled kites, and another based on soft bucket-drogues, in actual flying discovered a twisting instability in the LadderMill to-and-fro kite trains. A swivel between every kite unit would mostly resolve the problem. This LadderMill work was documented on the Old Forum around both five and ten years ago.
All in all, the AWES community is justified in developing simpler more standard designs, like perfecting WECS rigs of TRL9 COTS power kites for shaft-power. The LadderMill may remain a historical curiosity for kite hobbyists to experiment with. Specialized versions might emerge, like a cargo-lifting LadderMill to haul water up to create clouds, or other niche apps.
Note that the Yahoo Group did not move due to advantages in having two Forums with complimentary virtues.
As discussed, we have been presented with no evidence of any such laddermill experiments. Perfecting kites for shaft rotation - sure, just saying soft kites are wonderful while hard kites are “bad” is easy enough. Saying it every day gets redundant. The idea is, rather than just making claims of a superior approach, demonstrate superior performance in spinning that generator. In 12 years, still not spinning a generator. Now you want 11 more years - for what? Empty talk is easy. Flying kites is easy. Show us the electrical power generation by soft kites you keep touting.