I would prefer to focus on the content published under the title of “Advanced Kite Network (AKN)”, not the title itself. And also certainly @Rodread conceived Network Kites and Daisy network kite rotors, but I think the question is not there in first.
This AKN is an extension of Payne’s patent US3987987 figure 5.
AKN intends to multiply anchors in order to face all wind directions. My main question is:
isn’t the whole thing too hampered by the multiple tethers and pulley passages respectively causing drag and friction, to be able to move crosswind fast enough, even staying on a modest lift-to-drag ratio base of 3 or 4?
That said I would like to praise Dave Santos’ lucidity, who points out the objectives to which AWE should assign itself (higher, bigger), and which are materialized in this study by a flying set of dimensions superior to the length of the tethers, whereas usually a relatively small kite is meant to fly at the end of a relatively long tether, which leads to a too low Power to space use ratio.