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More âfakeâ news?:
Inside of worldâs largest airship revealed in stunning images
OK now maybe this âworldâs largest airshipâ could support airborne wind energy, except for one thing: it doesnât exist. It is just renderings. Guys (and girls), I canât tell you how many times some version of this same story (Worldâs largest airship", âworldâs largest blimpâ) have been âfloatedâ in the press, then never built. Seems like it has been the same âstoryâ repeated for my whole life. Another example of the perennial âfootballâ episode of âCharlie Brownâ cartoons.
Itâs well-known in the LTA world that these âworldâs largest airshipâ âprojectsâ are never actually built. The article says, at 60 mph, it will take longer than driving a car, but give a nice passenger experience. One thing I note is similar to AWE: What about bad weather? Or just âweatherâ, period? How do you schedule flights when a 50mph wind at altitude could reduce your ground-speed to 10 mph? What about takeoffs and landings in high winds? Flying in turbulence? There is all sorts of stuff that âsounds greatâ on paper, as long as nobody examines the details⌠
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You should know the drill by now: First have an idea in an area that is not your expertice. Then get a guy to make some nice renderings for cheap/free. Then convince someone its the greatest thing. THEN spend their money to learn and figure out why the idea was not so great after allâŚ
After all these years I canât understand why seeing this still bugs you
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Nice summary Tallak. I thought this was interesting to anyone with an penchant for aviation-related stuff especially slow-moving, hovering, potentially stationary airborne, etc. Lots of these âWorldâs Largest Airshipâ announcements do come from people skilled in the art, but they still never seem to get built. Personally, I had long-wondered why some company doesnât develop bigger, slower airplanes with more room inside, more emphasis on enjoying a luxury flight experience in a spacious interior with more amenities, rather than the âjust get me there fastâ sardine-can experience weâre all used to. I imagined flying lower and slower and enjoying the flight looking out large picture windows from areas where people could stand or walk around at leisure. But after doing some hang gliding and realizing one of the main dangers is flying at or near the windspeed, so shifting winds can ruin your whole day or worse, I started to see why the aviation industry has evolved to be the way it is, fast jets flying high to stay above the weather. A 40 mph crosswind would be a terrible thing to try to land a 40 mph airplane in, whereas at 200 mph, a 40 mph crosswind is a lower percentage of your airspeed. And a rainstorm or thunderstorm with 60 mph winds could really kill an airship traveling at 60 mph, or even just toss around a big, slow airplane, whereas a faster jet can cut through such weather far better.
Anyway, I just point this out so people can see it is not just AWE where we see endless press-releases about stuff that is never gonna happen. Itâs an epidemic, which is I think fueled and turbocharged by the internet and computer renderings. Seems like people need to be a bit more skeptical these days, and not just believe everything they read. 
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I am glad to see that you guys seem to be catching on now to âthe drillâ. That was my purpose for posting this: getting people who havenât yet noticed âthe drillâ to take note of how press-releases and renderings get promoted as facts, always âin the futureâ. Optimism helps to advance technology, but skepticism is also essential when merited. These days weâve gone from one âMollerâs flying carâ that had been âa year away from commercializationâ since the 1970âs, and just a very few years ago, about midway through the current AWE hype, had one last-gasp press-release of, again âa year awayâ, to seemingly hundreds of âflying carâ companies, all âa year awayâ from commercialization. The funny thing is though, there are still zero of them actually in use, for any purpose, anywhere in the world, by anyone, even in remote regions. Weird eh? My guess is with autonomous driving, traffic will be relieved, trips to the airport will become quicker, and most, if not all, of these flying car companies will become irrelevant. Who knows, but my main point is to not just believe every new âpress-releaseâ when you see it.
From Bacteria to Buildings: Additive Manufacturing Outside of the Box - S. Keating - MIT PhD Defense
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Worldâs most powerful tidal turbine : Launched April 2021
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Henrik Stiesdal - Offshore wind farms
Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC)
https://www.youtube.com/c/GlobalWindEnergyCouncil/playlists
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So far most floating offshore installation are using my original patented concept.
Worlds First Autonomous Ground Effect Vehicle/Ekranoplan? RCTestFlight Collaboration
Also about waterproofing electronics.
R/C Ground Effect Vehicle with LiDAR Altitude Control
http://www.xflr5.tech/xflr5.htm
Autonomous Slope Soaring - RCTESTFLIGHT
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=coning+rotor
Sharrow Engineering Propeller (2019-) Product Review Video - By BoatTEST.com https://youtu.be/fO862lWuBdE?t=754
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Really like that Sharrow boat prop
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I see no connection between the Sharrow boat propeller and the âAnalytic analysis of load alignment for coning extremeâscale rotorsâ.
Looks like a cool boat prop. The same has been done for airplane wings with âno tipsâ. Not sure how that has really worked out in the air but the boat props seem like a winner. Of course pushing a boat is different than harnessing energy from a flow. The downwind coning rotor has been discussed as long as I can remember. Trying to think of an example of one running⌠Centrifugal force would tend to reduce any tendency toward coning. The âtower-shadowâ is always a bigger factor for downwind machines than any promoter wants to acknowledge.
Nezzy²: The floating wind turbine
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/o921m0/why_dont_planes_have_dimples_like_golf_balls/
Baptiste LABAT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MbRyefYqPs&list=UUa67hFWRqXyehBhyk3YfBnA&index=2
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Looks great as long as they keep those blades feathered and donât let it run.
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-software-benefits-earth-available-for-business-public-use
Adam Savageâs Favorite Tools: Great Budget Vacuum Former!
F1D Indoor Free Flight | Flite Test
https://indoornewsandviews.com/
Can A 3D Printed Race Plane Withstand 100 MPH?!
Arnold Barnett: Is It Really Safe to Fly?
He talks about the different ways to measure risk in flying. He promotes accidental death risk per flight. In AWE you can think of similar metrics. For the company it might be plane loss per flight, for the aviation authorities it might be property damage and injuries and deaths per flight or per hours of flight. The best way to bring that down and convince aviation authorities that youâre safe enough is to fly a lot I think, besides the obvious things you can do about where you fly and what you fly.
He also talks about runway collisions. Iâd think you can do similar analyses when youâre flying multiple tethered planes.
Reddit - Dive into anything ||| Streamable Video
Kind of reminds me of the Makani crash. The solution that SpaceX came up with was to not catch the fairings with a ship but have them be able to survive a water landing. That would speed up your timeline.
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Scientists already knew that the output of a single wind turbine could be improved with a windbreak. While windbreaks slow wind speed close to the ground, above the height of the windbreak, wind speeds actually increase as air rushes over the top. But for large wind farms, thereâs a drawback. A windbreakâs wake slows the flow of air as it travels farther through the rows of turbines. That could suggest that windbreaks would be a wash for wind farms with many turbines.
In the simulations, the wind always came from the same direction, suggesting the technique might be useful in locations where wind tends to blow one way, such as coastal regions. Future studies could investigate how this technique might apply in places where wind direction varies.
By using airborne wind energy systems this technique might be optimal for two opposite wind directions, if it is really efficient. Perhaps the ground station could also be built as a windbreak. Being in principle orientable, the windbreak ground station could cope with any changes in wind directionâŚ
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