No, it is what it is. You’re acting too cocky with your supposed knowledge of VAWT. If you really knew about this subject, you would have answered the blade obstruction problem I outlined here.
And this could already be visible there. But thanks to the Tensairity rods, the blades would be freed from the obstruction caused by the balloon. But you don’t go that far: it’s easier to criticize the work of others and constantly mock Magenn or similar projects.
All I do is tell the truth. There is NOTHING “vertical-axis” about the Magenn MARS horizontal-axis, rotating balloon. And any real wind person knew, the moment they laid eyes on it, that it took the least efficient, least effective, commonly pursued newbie approach to extracting electricity from the wind, and made it more complicated, more expensive, more difficult to deploy, and less reliable, less sustainable, less dispatchable, all aspects unappreciated by wind newbies, which can be excused, and perpetual wind newbies, which really has no excuse, resulting in a largely ineffective showpiece right out of Hollywood, reminiscent of the giant Marshmallow Man from the Ghostbusters movie. Nothing that could be taken seriously by the wind industry was ever even suggested, let alone presented. But the idle masses, the teeming throngs of wind know-nothings, true to form, know nothing of any of this, and are just as entertained by the Magenn debacle as they were by the Ghostbusters movie. There is nothing to do about Magenn except explain how bad it is. It’s an imposter. A lie, really. And the idea that anyone who has been studying wind energy for almost 2 decades is still talking seriously about Magenn says it all, and deserves no more discussion. Why are newbies typically drawn to drag-based turbines? That’s simple: because the concept IS so simple that, literally, any idiot can in fact understand it. And so those same idiots are drawn to what they can understand: “Wind can push”. That’s it. That’s as far as it goes: Wind can push. They immediately understand the operating principle, without having to think, or learn anything new, so they gravitate toward it and become fixated, and fascinated by it. How many seconds do you think your new hero, Mike Bergey, would take to identify Magenn as a joke? 1 second? 2 seconds?
Nope.
It’s the opposite. A Savonius turbine is in the general drag-based category. And a Savonius wind turbine is a vertical-axis wind turbine (VAWT).
Think about it: if you have a HAWT, it won’t become a VAWT just because you lay it down. The same is true for a VAWT: if you lay it horizontally, like MARS (from Magenn), it won’t become a HAWT. It’s a matter of structure. The authors of the article perfectly defined MARS as a drag-based VAWT (I added “horizontally mounted drag-based VAWT”), without making the beginner’s mistake of comparing it to a Savonius turbine, whose two S-shaped buckets are separate, which isn’t the case for MARS. You’re completely wrong.
You’re right about one thing: MARS from Magenn can’t produce much. But any three-year-old knows this: “Dad, why don’t we ever see AWES in the sky?”
There are many, many possible configurations. Just because, in your limited experience, you have only seen drag-based turbines mounted with the axis vertical, meaning they do not need to be aimed into a horizontal wind, does not mean, when their axis is horizontal, that they are still “vertical-axis”. The axis of the Magenn is clearly horizontal, and Magenn DOES need to be aimed, or allowed to aim. unlike vertical-axis machines.
The actual terminology you are blindly and unknowingly searching for is “cross-axis”, which refers to turbines where the axis extends across the wind, as opposed to “parallel-axis” where the axis is parallel to the wind. But, as a perpetual newbie, that’s pretty much par for the course. 
A VAWT, like Magenn’s MARS, horizontally mounted:
I notice over the years, certain non-wind people pronounce VAWT as a word: “Vawt”. It seems simple enough to them - they’ve seen it in print, and think of it as “a word”. I’ve aways seen that as an obvious sign that they were not technical wind people, as a sign of a lack of familiarity, or even a lack of intelligence. I’ve never heard real wind people pronounce the acronym as a word, even when the axis is vertical.
Real wind people very seldom talk about Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWT’s) at all, except as a joke, and if they do, they usually specify “Darrieus” or “Savonius”, especially if mounted transversely (horizontally, across the wind). In fact, as the person with more types of wind turbines patented than anyone in the world, I believe I may have been the first to introduce the term “cross-axis”, likely in response to the extreme and never-ending ignorance of the perpetual newbies in AWE forums.
There’s another term I introduced: “perpetual newby”. which would seem to be an oxymoron, but is nonetheless accurate in the field of AWE, where pretty much all parties (numbering in the thousands!) pretending to participate, do in fact function (or fail to function) perpetually as mere newbies, who have never, and will never, create a viable working wind energy system of any kind. Hard to imagine thousands of people all making the same empty claims of future progress, yet 100% of whom have never bothered to build even a single wind energy system of any kind that has been actually placed into general service, right?
Anyway, you repeating over and over that turbines with a transverse, horizontal axis, are somehow “really” “vertical-axis” machines is just a mark of stubborn, persistent ignorance. This is especially true with the Magenn MARS system, since there has never been a equivalent machine mounted vertically. “Real wind people” know that the Darrieus- and Savonius-type rotors can be mounted at any angle to the Earth, with the only requirement being that they are at least partially “transverse” to the wind.
I noticed that word “transverse” the other day when reading about V-6 car engines being mounted either “longitudinally” or “transversely” and immediately realized that “transverse-axis” may be an even better (more specific) term than the more general “cross-axis” for horizontally-mounted, cross-axis wind turbines, since even when mounted vertically, they may still be technically called “cross-axis” since the axis is perpendicular to the wind, where the word “transverse” seems even more specific as to the axis of rotation extending horizontally across the wind.
Of course the immediate disadvantage of horizontal mounting is it throws away the entire usual rationalization for vertical-axis turbines, which is of course, that they “do not need to aim”. Anyway, undue attention, or in your case, endless fixation, on the Magenn debacle as some sort of viable wind energy device, alone, is a mark of being out of touch with the realities of wind energy, while insisting it is a vertical-axis wind turbine goes even beyond the most absurd statements by the most absurd people (who will go unnamed) in airborne wind energy forums.
You know what I often wonder, Pierre? You went on for years about your original idea for modifying the Italian concept of kites pulling a carousel around in a circle, with what you called the “rotating reeling” concept. Now I never took more than 2 seconds trying to figure out exactly what you meant by “rotating reeling” because i did not feel it was worth wasting any mental energy on. I figured if you said you had a workable idea, well that is wonderful, and if it were true, we’d know about it soon enough.
Well, as the years rolled on, your fixation kept shifting to various other “breakthrough” ideas, all of which you talked about with great enthusiasm, wanting to be taken seriously. What I wondered the whole time was "What happened to the “rotating-reeling” concept (whatever that actually was), and if it were such a great idea, why did you never build one, and why did you stop talking about it?
These days, we’ve had a similar few years of you promoting the “spinning sausage” concept, probably due to that French group who is insisting it is going to save the world. You scold people for not reading your longwinded descriptions of what will probably never work anyway, and as you have told me, merely amuse yourself, pretending to be doing serious wind energy research through your idle tippity-tapping on your keyboard.
This new fixation on naming machines that a 5-year-old could tell us has a horizontal-axis, even if he didn’t know the word “horizontal”, seems to go beyond the endless nonsense we suffered from that most famous nonsensical personality from the old forum who many took seriously, until it became obvious to even the most gullible people, that he was completely out-of-it, and someone whose influence was best avoided.
Anyway, i leave you with another “new” term in wind energy: “transverse-axis” for a wind turbine arranged across the wind, horizontally. So don’t say I’ve never done anything for you!