Really? Who? SO this is the answer? The end of your endless delays? This is going to (in the future of course…) make your latest stated breakthrough-without-a-breakthrough work? So is this the breakthrough? The enabling “secret sauce” that will transition everything from the all-talk fake-news-of-the-future to actual progress? Two springs instead of one. Pulling your shizzle in to swap out kites when the windspeed changes? What if the wind speed just keeps changing? That is the norm - changing wind speeds. Last I heard, rather than increasing wind speeds, as we heard for decades, NOW “global warming” is going to LOWER wind speeds around the world. Don;t worry, most people are too busy to notice whenever they do a 180 on what you are supposed to believe any given week.
Seems silly for Dave to have to use John’s account if he is going to post, doesn’t it?
Flight Dynamics and Stability of Kites in Steady and Unsteady Wind Conditions
L. Salord Losantos and G. Sanchez-Arriaga
From page 660, abstract:
The kite stability and an interesting resonance phenomenon are explored with the aid of a numerical method based on Floquet theory.
From page 664:
Figure 7 also displays an interesting resonance phenomenon.
The amplitudes of the periodic orbits are higher if the frequency
that modulates the wind-velocity perturbation is close to an eigenfrequency of the kite;
Kite eigenfrequency may concern several aspects of the kite environment. One of them, not considered in this study, could be the optimal way to tune (in all senses of the word) the respective eigenfrequencies of each of the units (kixels) of a kite network according to the considered trajectories and the respective position changes of said units within the kite network.
From Dave Santos:
"
Many thanks to PierreB for sharing this wonderful link, that the small contribution here is to validate, as a third-party, and to further interpret and extend. [Losantos, Sanchez-Arriaga, AAIA, 2014] numerically substantiates the exact heuristic-empiric theoretics reported here. Expect AWES tuned to Eigen Frequency resonance to now be easy, predictable, and effective, to anyone skilled in the art-
"
Even if that were so, @dougselsam; a globally lowered Wind speed due to climate change would not alter the fact that higher winds are stronger and more powerful thus capable of doing more work.
AWE is still for relatively Higher Winds beyond the heights of ground- hugging towers.
Yes, I believe that was the theme of the first high altitude wind power conference you helped to organize - what was it, 14 years ago? Deriding those pesky “windtowers” that use up too much material to elevate a wind turbine, raising its cost by 20% (???). Extracting wind power from the jet stream? …
In the ensuing interval, the wholesale price of wind-generated electricity (still using towers) has dropped in half, while there remains no AWE system in regular operation (that we know of), certainly not from you!
From DaveS:
"Airborne Wind Energy pioneer, astronaut, and physicist, Dr. Wubbo Ockels, always believed in Networked Kites (qua Aircraft) to tap Upper Winds at multi-MW unit-plant scale, beginning with a ring topology he named “Laddermill”, leading to more complex star and mesh topologies he named “SpiderMill”, shortly before his untimely death in 2014. Ever since, US and EU AWE researchers continued developing Wubbo’s “Kite Network” concept space, now developed in detailed theory and subscale experiments, mostly in kPower and Jalbert Aerology Lab circles, but also at TUKaiserslautern and UTexas.
Now the University of Freiburg [De Shutter et al 2022] has made a nice analytic validation of Wubbo’s belief in superior Power Density (PD) of AWE “Multi-Aircraft Systems” compared to single-unit AWES topology and conventional wind turbines. They found almost an order of magnitude PD advantage over conventional wind turbines in the same land footprint, and even greater advantage over single unit AWES topology.
Freiburg’s “Multi-Aircraft” spatial schema-
The paper-
Vertical Airborne Wind Energy Farms with High Power Density per Ground Area based on Multi-Aircraft Systems
Jochem De Schutter, Jakob Harzer, Moritz Diehl
University of Freiburg 2022
Abstract—
This paper proposes and simulates vertical airborne wind energy (AWE) farms based on multi-aircraft systems with high power density (PD) per ground area. These farms consist of many independently ground located systems that are flying at the same inclination angle, but with different tether lengths, such that all aircraft fly in a large planar elliptical area that is vertical to the tethers. The individual systems are assigned non-overlapping flight cylinders depending on the wind direction. Detailed calculations that take into account Betz’ limit, assuming a cubically averaged wind power density of 7 m/s, give a potential yearly average PD of 43 MW/km2. A conventional wind farm with typical packing density would yield a PD of 2.4 MW/km2 in the same wind field. More refined simulations using optimal control result in a more modest PD of 6 MW/km2 for practically recommended flight trajectories. This PD can already be achieved with small-scale aircraft with a wing span of 5.5 m. The simulations additionally show that the achievable PD is more than an order of magnitude higher than for a single-aircraft AWE system with the same wing span. (Emphasis added)
Third Party Context: Related “Multi-Aircraft” AWES concepts, with analogous superior PD and scaling performance predicted. The difference being the SpiderMill version has a many-connected order for topological stability.
(4) (PDF) Advanced Kite Networks (researchgate.net)
"
Hello John @AweEnthusiast,
Indeed I think this document offers a solid enough basis to be reworked as you do with Spidermill and Advanced Kite Networks, but also with Low radius loop (whose objective is to decrease the radius of action while keeping most of the power of the intercepted wind, thus increasing the density within a kite-farm or network), some goals being Safety management in a kite-farm allowing more density or improving Power to space use ratio. Other topics may also be affected. This document could therefore be usefully quoted several times.
Pierre, you are replying to Santos, not John. Meanwhile, I would point out, after 14 years+ of musings about AWE possibilities, we’re struggling with even the concept of a laterally-arranged multitude of energy-harvesting wind-responsive elements? Rather than a “paper”, how about a single sentence: “You could arrange AWE elements in an array spanning a crosswind distance.” How about that? And haven’t we mentioned that many times over the years? As Tallak points out, merely repeating the obvious is not progress. To me, it seems similar to saying regular wind turbines could be placed in a row across the wind. (Like they were 2000 years ago) In the field of architecture, it would be like saying you could locate multiple houses on the same street. It’s almost the same as saying nothing at all.
I say hello to John, and reply to Dave’s topic. It seems obvious to me, not to you?
On the content I invite you to read some consequences that come to mind on this paper, in first the possible no requirement to scale up for rigid kites. But you likely already guessed it as it should be obvious.
Answer:
The news for the past week has been mostly the same story.
Google “Santos”, then click on “news”, and you’ll find a familiar theme.
Dave Santos replied:
"
Top of search results for “Santos” today (Friday 30th December 2022) - is how the late soccer legend, Pele, made the team named Santos great.
Dave Santos (of kpower / JAL) goes by that name since childhood to distinguish from his father, David Harold Guinn. Santos was the first name of Dave’s maternal grandfather, Santos Gorena. Dave’s full legal name is David Santos Gorena-Guinn.
Ad hominem attacks traditionally reflect poorly on a hapless abusers-
Also, many kite explorers have set off from the South Pole under kite power. There is nothing wrong with exploring how kite power can someday reduce dependence on diesel fuel-
"
N.B. Clarifications in brackets are mine.
JohnO
DaveS Replying @tallakt :
"
Not sure what AWE post ever was
as upsetting as AWE censorship
"
From me:
Happy new year. Wishing all a most successful year 2023 in all ramifications.
To Tallak: Not sure what news you are getting over there, but over here the revelations are the authorities paid the hosting companies and gave them a list of people to ban.
To Dave: Trying to weasel out of your own name now…OK, fine, thanks for clarifying, but you don’t even mention the topic here. I only note, every news outlet going after a familiar-sounding string of lies and false credentials, and the irony is how history never quite repeats, but often “rhymes”. 
How is that related to what happened here? Internet Service Providers? Or the Twitter ordeal?
Hi Tallak: I was referring to what was said by the stick-figure on the first frame of the comic you provided. The point is, what the stick figure was citing as what the authorities are not allowed to do is in fact exactly what they were doing, and in that same effort a lot of people have consistently been in jail for a very long time, without any official proceedings to resolve why they were put there. It’s not how things are supposed to work, and it is a continuing theme to note it’s just further silencing of whomever they find annoying kind of like Davinci and Copernicus were silenced for speaking of their simple observations and analysis of what they observed - nothing new under the sun, so to speak!
I think this is a bit more serious than what happens in this forum.