Original topic:
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The current market is to perform early AWE R&D. Around a billion dollars is publicly known to have been spent, and Peter Lynn claims its far more.
KPower declined to bring its small KiteSat AWES to market, focusing instead on the R&D long game, on the next billion. This is imagined to be a broad inclusive movement, not the present confusion of disjointed venture marketing claims. Broad research was Wubbo Ockel’s intent, if he had lived.
Who is kPower? Link?
TUDelft’s world AWE map omits most non-EU players, like kPower, which leads many to not know how much is going on. kPower was founded in 2007, with many key firsts-
What are the key first? Curious, and no mention on the web page after a quick look…
A broad inclusive movement, What are you talking about? What has done Kpower that is not a 10 years old thing? A what the interest in mentioning somebody dead that hardly anyone know.
I left the previous forum to avoid your much too frequent email. And there you are with the exact same crap.
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Wubbo Ockels died too soon, only a little while ago, and was influential and loved.
Here is perhaps the start of a productive discussion on this topic:
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Olivier,
Wubbo knew most of the pioneers and many AWE students over two or so decades. He truly advocated a broad AWE movement, as his videos prove.
kPower seems to have been first to demo a fully autonomous AWES with self-relaunch capability, first to do Kiwee’s architecture (ten years earlie. KiteMotor1), first to tap looping foils, first to do multi-week session, first to tap self-oscillating wings (flipwings, first AWE product on sale), and on and on. The latest first was to observe cosine law offset by wind gradient. Not done yet, just starting, I hope.
If you came to this Forum to escape my presence, I can go away, in your favor.
I hope with a little bit more moderation than almost none at all, frustration with other posters can be limited somewhat.
As for me, I like to read stuff that is on-topic, easy to understand for a novice, and doesn’t need much guesswork and research by the reader. Dave, your writing looks to me like it assumes a vast amount of knowledge on the part of the reader, the result is that much of it goes over my head. I try to write in a way so that a 10-year-old will be able to understand it. If I reference something I will often give links so that the reader can do their own research.
I enjoy your humor too though, and would like to continue seeing your contributions, if only a little better referenced.
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kpowertechnology,com, not to be confused with Kitepower B.V. might have spent a lot of time on their kites but they don’t seem to be en route to commerzialization or other large scale deployment and frankly they don’t make a very professional impression.
But I do see how the mention might be relevant, since they were probably pretty far ahead but didn’t get to commercialization.
This issue was quite predictable.^^ I was hoping that the categories and threads allow people to follow specific threads of interest without being bothered by the noise in others. I’d like to allow quite a bit of informal chat in the “Lounge” for example. I don’t recommend using mailing list mode. I’ve turned it off long ago. It’s also possible to get notifications just when ones name is mentioned, just for private messages or none at all. Noone expects immediate replies.
@Windy_Skies thx for keeping the threads on topic by splitting. This is one of the things that keeps things tidy and easy to find.
I hope to accomodate a wide variety of people and interests here. I don’t expect everyone to engage with all the content and hope that it’s easy to find threads of interest.
As for the style of writing: I don’t mind, and even hope for, in depth conversations that can’t be followed by myself and other laypeople. But please don’t make things unneccessary hard, for example by using uncommon acronyms. If you mention things that presupposes some uncommon knowledge, please mention what exactly you’re referencing and add a link.Explaining things in a way that a 10-year-old will be able to understand it, might blow things up too much. But it has its place for example in the AMA thread
.
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Yes the extra comunal working features this forum uses are a bonus and we should make sure to use them.
Making a wiki from an initial post. Super.
Flagging posts… Either just to the author or admins… Valuable
Liking posts… If I’m a visitor and this post has 5 hearts lets see it then…
Linking… Is fine but
Maybe we can have a wiki with links to the most group voted productive ideas
Or the users can have a slightly more nuanced voting method or tool based on our perception of post value 5/10 for this post etc
Ha ha I just edited this pist to post… Again such an improvement
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Ok let’s have a look at Kitemotor : It uses no right angle transmission . It is a direct shaft transmission with no adherence on the pulley and lot of friction within slippy ring.
Kiwee is that :
As you can see the upper part use a right angle belt transmission on which the patent is about and was missing from all previous patent. That is the only way you can transmit power that way, in any other cases, friction is just too huge.
To me, Ideas are just ideas until you made it to the finish line .
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Olivier, The successful “finish line” for KiteMotor1 was its two public demos in 2007 which were covered in media articles. The capstan mechanism was chosen due to better trigonometry, since the cableway runs ~45deg and the turbine has a slight lift angle of ~15deg. The remaining 30deg alignment was easy handled by the fairleads. This standard mechanics of fishing rods. Capstan function did not slip with two turns, but could have gone to five turns. The prototype is at the World Kite Museum for any kite person to inspect and test.
Again, KiteMotor1 was never an intended commercial design, but an experimental prototype. If it was the first passive-autonomous groundgen AWES, that’s better than any badge.
Good luck to you in your difficult role commercializing in an undeveloped market, under the PR cloud of the big AWE ventures. I endorsed your fundraising project on the Old Forum. Blame the rich ventures for your marginalization. If I was FortF, you would long ago have had an order for 100 units, to share with all the teams.
dave
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Do you have a link with more info?
Replying to questions over KiteLab/kPower commercial strategy and professionalism:
Megascale AWE was seen in my circles as an R&D long game. Any premature architectural down-select or small-scale product commercialization was not the long-game end-game. Pioneering R&D is the current market, and that’s a wonderful phase. KiteLab Ilwaco marketed the FlipWing AWE WECs as an experimental device in 2008, perhaps the first AWE product.
The Wright Brothers were first-in-flight even as they clearly looked less professional than Langley and Maxim, to misinformed observers. Similarly, kPower intends to prevail by a focus on testing and flying. Let others depend instead on professional appearance in conventional terms.
When I was ten years old or so, I begged my mother to by me a scientific dictionary, being attracted by the mystery of science jargon. Hopefully there is room for those ten year olds on the New Forum to absorb the expanded vocabulary. TACO 1.0 has a large acronym glossary. These unlock the Old Forum to Data Mining. I love simple texts too, its a simple-only bias that bothers me.
There is still the Discobot question. Its screen-shot shows its claim not to be a real person, but other material shows a human sock-puppeteer with superuser powers. Yes, it runs scripts, but is it not a Mechanical Turk, with a human hidden inside to provide its higher logic?
I’ve found no effidence supporting that in my quick search. I know you had something. Can you repost it?
It’s only a market if there are buyers.
Even if some company does not commercialize any small scale system they can gain value and go through investment rounds.
First result on TACO 1.0 for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phax35M9fZg
It’s just a courtesy to your reader to link your references, and expand your acronyms. Don’t do it and you’ll soon get ignored.
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I posted the audit trail on the Old Forum. Discobot is a sockpuppet-bot for a Norwegian PR person for Discourse.
Pioneering AWE R&D has already raised around a billion. Part of the billion is sport and military parafoil R&D, and similar aerospace niche research, which soft-kite experts see as closely AWE applicable.