Yes I will elaborate: We wind people have suffered year after year of unwarranted insults to actual, working wind energy systems, in lieu of any real progress in airborne wind energy. Typical in the history of wind energy. Now you want to fixate on a single word “violent”, as an excuse to ignore the overall content of my message, while the previous poster tried the typical irrelevant dodge of listing a bunch of largely unrelated technologies, attempting to rationalize the endless lack of progress and inability to achieve any stated goal or promised result in the entire field of AWE, from pulling ships, to powering remote villages, or X hundreds of homes, in location Y, by date Z.
We practitioners of wind energy, no matter how optimistic we may be about the possibilities of AWE, are simply holding up a mirror to the world of attempted AWE:
“Here’s what was promised.”
contrasted with:
“Here’s what happened.”
(Just imagine if Elon Musk was still working on getting the first electric car into regular, daily operation, after 15 years of trying, versus having developed the largest-selling car in the world! There is just a teeny contrast there. Anyone can talk. But not everyone can make things happen.)
Meanwhile. we’re still reading about the same mundane beginner questions such as “flygen or groundgen?”, “hard blades or soft blades” (settled over a thousand years ago), and (related) whether cloth-fabric kites can be sturdy enough, to last long enough, to be economical. And the most outrageous claims are made by the least knowledgeable people, lucky to light an LED assuming they stop bragging long enough to actually TRY to make something work. It’s a world of perpetual newbies who never seem to learn or advance, and just keep making the same silly mistakes over and over, while denigrating working wind energy systems - a well-worn and tired theme in wind energy, very similar to, and amply demonstrated, by the vertical-axis people.
So, sorry to inject a viewpoint of simple observations from the world of real wind energy, where making power is not the issue so much as low-cost, reliability and longevity, but yes, I’ve been making the same points for the entire duration of the current AWE hype-cycle, most of what I’ve noted has turned out to be true, and nothing much has changed, except most of the worst offenders have gone out of business.
You have to understand how this all looks to an unbiased, let alone experienced, viewpoint. It’s like listening to some catastrophe-based religious cult where facts simply don’t matter, only the endless narrative. Imagine walking into some newfangled end-of-world bible study group and asking why there seems to be no evidence of its supposed origins in Roman records, despite their fastidious record-keeping, as one example. What would result? A violently unwelcome reaction, because it questions their echo-chamber circular narrative. When you get to a cult status, actual, relevant questions, are unwanted by many. The cult-members are comfortable, as long as they can go on in their echo-chamber of possible delusions, while the promised “end of the world” never seems to arrive, and is instead perpetually rescheduled, further into the future. Sound familiar yet?
So, once again, all we few optimistic people who still have a healthy skepticism do, is to hold up a mirror, “Here’s what you said, then here’s what happened”. If you can’t stand having a mirror held up, and the contrast between the promises made, versus the actual lack of results actually noted, then that might be some sort of wake-up call, meant to help, not harm. 