Rotary MAWES concept: (rigid or soft) kites arranged into a (ground-controlled) bol kite suspended from a (flygen) carriage suspended from a (multiple-line) lifter kite (train)

[Windy_Skies]

Some older ideas:

I don’t see a simple and obvious way to do launch and landing and so on. And I don’t know how much torque can be harvested before the carriage starts spinning with the kites. You’d need to do something like have high tension on the lifting line probably, or maybe add a vane to the carriage, which seems limited.

It might be interesting to put the carriages on posts. They could then drive rope drives connecting the posts, or generators on the posts. Then you’ve got the problem that the posts are never going to be aligned perfectly to the wind. You might make them movable. How about putting them all of then on a ship?

What would that look like and how would launch and landing look like. Should the ship have multiple orientations, deck and ship horizontal, deck and ship tilted 70 degrees if the kites are at a 20 degree elevation angle… Should the ship be double-hulled to get a large enough footprint for the elliptical carousel…

Or instead of multiple posts you could use two, where one or both are movable. Maybe one or both is a carousel instead.

And some newer ideas:

Another carousel idea somewhat inspired by the nodes / towers in this comment: Economical assessment of the scalability of the ground station in pumping mode - #5 by Windy_Skies

Now towers are arranged in a circle or ellipse. The carriages are mounted on top of the towers. The idea now is on how the tethers are arranged. You could have 3 loops: one would go through the carriages, connected to this like before with lines is a lower radius loop, with a radius at least half a wingspan lower than which the towers make. The outer wings of the kites could rest on this during rest. Connected to this is another loop with an even lower radius for the inner wings of the kites to rest on. These two shorter loops hook over and around the carriages and towers. These two loops make a perch for kites to sit on, or mounting points for perches for the kites.

The perch could be something like a rod between the two loops with fairlead(s) for the tether(s) to go through. These tethers could go to a ground station in the center of the circle, letting them in and out. The carriages could drive generators in the towers or via rope drives drive a generator in the central ground station. Or it could make a yoyo system for example.

The carousel would be horizontal. Some thoughts from this comment on cams for example could be relevant: Claim: Kites in a MAWES need to be able to: CLAMP onto the tether and LATCH onto the previous kite + a discussion on how to do this + a first mention of stackable kites + a concept for automatic launch of a soft kite train - #67 by Windy_Skies

Arranging the towers into an ellipse and putting it on a ship sounds like a fun idea.