You should be careful using the term ‘reeling life factor’ or CBOS life factor to loosely as it has a very specific meaning in rope science which is the FOS x d:D ratio and is used as an input to fatigue calculations. I agree it has nothing to do with kite life, and I am unfamiliar with ‘kite life factors’, are there any mathematical definitions? or are these a more high level high descriptive term for failure modes?
By the way the video of the tether jumping off its sheave which you have posted several times, it is obviously a malfunction and very frustrating that the camera operator we hired decided that this was a good thing to have in a published video. But it was not a product just a test bed for kites and automation systems and not a test of tether protection technology (a winch which effectively protects a tether for a practical commercial service life would have to be different in many ways).
As for the winches the large winch, 500KW, is with the scrap merchants. The double winch mounted on the lorry I don’t know; it was in Germany for a while and it might have been sold to Kitemill. The device is not the same as in the old videos as one side has been replaced with a smaller winch now to allow testing at different scales. The transmissions of these two winches are independent there is one 100kg 15 m/s winch and a second 800 kg 8 m/s winch. The winch would be very useful to someone just getting started, so I hope it sees some new action if it hasn’t been scrapped in Germany already.
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