The dis-similarities to AWE requirements are also important. Rutan’s seaplane is completely unsuited as a WECS kite due to its high-capital cost, high stall-speed, low unit-power, high-mass, high wing-loading, IC engine, passenger systems, and so on.
No one should expect an offshore AWES wing can double as its own boat and still hope to fly in most-probable wind, and also survive storms.
Recalling that Rutan at least believed in AWE visionary, Wayne German, enough to support him as successor Director of Boeing’s Flight Research Institute, even if Rutan himself had no well-informed sense of power kite design.
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This completely misses the point. The implicit invitation is to look at the similarities and learn from them. We’re all well enough aware of the dissimilarities. The name-dropping is just off-topic.
Talk about the similarities and what we can learn from them instead.
No folks are really are not aware enough of the complex dissimilarities, unless you are belaboring this is as a dead-end model “that we’re all well enough aware of”.
We must elaborate on the aerospace science and aeronautical art of wing-loading, Re, seaplane seaworthiness, and so forth. These are not topics to gloss over.
Lets just be sure superficial similarities don’t mask critical flaws in specific comparison. At least state just what lesson is learned by holding up this case only by non-critical similarities.
Part of the reason that this trash-topic exists is Burt Rutan’s celebrity status, while comparable peers like Wayne German are barely known. Its Rutan who was banally “name dropped” on this forum, as a celeb, while Wayne’s AWE ideas are not in demand.
Wayne is wrongly relegated to a topic without the original Rutan context, as if Wayne had more to do with seaplanes as a whole, and Rutan should not be part of the topic here.
Its a dubious hypothesis that “a seaplane is probably not a viable AWES”. After all the Albatross is a biological seaplane powered by AWE.
Its a safer claim that Burt Rutan’s seaplane is specifically unsuited as an AWES model.