SuperTurbine (tm) and Serpentine, and other torque transfer systems

Hello Pierre:
The fact that you have learned a new vocabulary word “catenary” does not even imply that I have not been aware of driveshaft sag from the earliest days. That is the word I have always used to describe the sag, although since driveshafts do have some stiffness, it is not strictly accurate. A limp rope or chain has a catenary sag. A stiffer elongate member tends toward catenary, but at that point it is only an approximate description.

Also, every horizontal beam experiences sag of one form or another. Every multi-rotor turbine I have ever thought of, or built, had driveshaft gravitational sag as a major factor. You are not anywhere even close to an original observation or idea on that, and in fact I could point you to an additional invention I came up with, over a decade ago, that takes advantage of the sag effect of a driveshaft in an advantageous way, after seeing this strange effect in action in one of my prototypes. And no it is not another SuperTurbine™.

Yes the buoyant rotor concept was to elevate the entire apparatus, and it naturally overcomes the sag effect, which is elementary to SuperTurbine™ technology, and always has been.

What I go through is often an incessant cascade of people mentioning one mundane effect or idea about SuperTurbine after another, as the aspects pop into their heads, and I really get tired of trying to find new ways of saying “Yeah thanks, but I already thought of that”, or “Yes that is in my notes”.

It also takes patience to watch others try to develop their versions of SuperTurbine™ technology that, yes I had recorded years or decades ago, and keep my silence, lest the discussion turn into an endless crash course on all my inventive thoughts going back decades. I’m really sorry that being a real inventor means I probably thought of aspects of my own inventions long before idle observers and bystanders stumble across them.

It was also hurtful for me to, as one example, defend hard blades and the legitimacy of even having patents, against an early tirade of Dave Santos & his new-at-the-time disciple, Roddy, gleefully denigrating patents as “blocking patents” and patent holders as “patent trolls”, while they maintained that soft kites were the best way to make power, when I knew better, since soft blades for wind turbines were replaced by defined substantially rigid airfoils 1000 years ago.

I finally came right out and told Roddy if he ever wanted to make decent power he would need to use hard blades, which he did and immediately made ten (10) times the power, while never acknowledging that I had advised him to use hard blade or thanking me for my good advice.

And of course now Roddy has filed patents, never mentioning his former gleeful denigration of patents as he followed the lead of his mentor-at-the-time, Dave Santos, who has always maintained that SuperTurbine™ technology is somehow just some impossible solution, while never generating any significant power himself.

The specific reason I contacted and had interaction with the lenticular aerostat balloon manufacturer 20 years ago was indeed to explore making them into rotors with blades at the periphery.

Being dedicated to developing SuperTurbine™ technology for so many years, I have explored on paper every possibility anyone has ever mentioned, long before they mentioned it. That is just the facts. I know, I know, SuperTurbine™ brings out the “inventor” in everyone, - it is contagious, but this is all old news to me.

Congratulations on thinking up what I came up with so long ago, and sorry if it hurts your feelings to know it is an old idea for me. You could always come up with your own inventions though, right? You know, some new breakthrough nobody ever thought of?

Tallak, I was flying, looping, and crashing control-line Cox model airplanes with gas engines as a kid way back in the 1960’s, and, yes, I have certainly explored such ideas as the upside-down pyramid you have described, on paper and in my dreams, long before this present AWE chat group ever existed. My versions, however, have many additional features that yours does not.

When someone like me, with a naturally inventive mind, has been hard at work on the stacked rotor concept, including the stacked flying rotor concept, for wind energy, for literally decades, it should not be surprising that I have already thought of most of these versions and aspects. .

Really sorry that being at the forefront of a technology for so many years means I’ve thought of all this stuff before. Sorry if it hurts anyone’s feelings. It is just one of many burdens and challenges that we true innovators often face, and have to deal with in some form.

Generally I try to use the correct word, here to identify the sag effect problem when scaling up, as one can see on a video and that I mentioned and that you were ignoring as the discussions have shown.

Indeed in one of my previous comments I repeat again your definition in your patent [“These three aiming strategies—horizontal offset, vertical offset, and sagging catenary suspension, may also be combined to arrive at intermediate configurations. The idea is to have the most wind possible hit the majority of the rotors of the series, at the best angle for optimum power generation, as much of the time as possible.”] then my reply: [" It is not only an issue of “to have the most wind possible hit the majority of the rotors of the series”. As I mentioned, the catenary sag effect aggravates the scalability problem. And apparently the problem of scalability due to the catenary sag effect has not been addressed until now: this is evidenced by the skeptical reactions since here, in spite of the details I provided."].

Rest assured: I will not charge you a fee for having clarified this crucial point about the structural limits on the basic system by catenary sag effect :slightly_smiling_face: .

It’s good to admit it NOW after constantly ignoring it.

So NOW you are implicitly admitting that there is a sag effect problem (as seen on video) for the basic system. That said, and as I said and repeated, you did not mention the issue of sag connected to scaling up (mass x drive-shaft length) before (see above).

I have to take your word for it, which I find very difficult. I have not seen any reaction (of type it is my invention) from you after my comment which describes and shows a lenticular balloon surrounded by blades (including also secondary rotors in the last sketch).

You also must have dreamed that @tallakt would develop this version years later :slightly_smiling_face:.

Hello Pierre: The reason I ignored your repeated assertions about catenary sag, or any kind of sag, is that it was already addressed, and so your assertions that SuperTurbine™ was limited to the few meters of height you had seen in my prototypes was inaccurate, and also that I could tell you, as a bystander, had stumbled across my original spinning lenticular balloon with blades idea, and I could tell you were wanting to reveal it as a modification of SuperTurbine™, and really did not know what to say until you privately issued an implied threat to me to reveal it yourself, unless I revealed it first.

Another reason was I did not want to get into a stupid “argument” like this over it, since I see you as a friend, and more rational of the typical extreme nutcases typically attracted to AWE chat groups, and your repeated assertions that I was somehow unaware of driveshaft sag as an issue were so unrealistic, without any basis in fact, that I just did not wish to tell you how misguided that assertion was.

If you watch my videos, or look at my pictures, you will note driveshaft sag in most, often to an extreme extent. The idea that you, as a mere bystander, understood driveshaft sag and all its implications more than me, who designed, built, and ran every single SuperTurbine™ prototype over many years is SO ABSURD it does not merit a response, until you absolutely forced me into responding.
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Above is a frame from a Discovery Channel video on me. The driveshaft is made of steel, runs extremely smoothly, and like every driveshaft, it sags.
Since your nonstop false assertions that SuperTurbine™ was hopelessly limited by driveshaft sag, you have now admitted that many of the embodiments in my first SuperTurbine™ patent did in fact overcome any such limitation by rotor buoyancy. And you apparently also think that I could not have further optimized the buoyant rotor concept in the last few decades, which is inaccurate.

So, whether you were wrong about SuperTurbine being hopelessly limited by driveshaft sag due to not looking more closely at that first SuperTurbine™ patent, or you were just lying, and trying to bait me into revealing all my ideas publicly, in either case, I did not feel that your false assertions warranted a response from me. As I’ve told you, there are many ways to address such problems. Engineering always involves problem solving, and I am pretty good at it, which is why my machines tend to work pretty well.

By the way, don’t you guys ever get any sleep over there in Europe? I mean, you’re still going on about this, and it’s bedtime even here in California!

Meanwhile, Not sure if you’ve heard, but we’re about to be hit by what is being called the worst winter storm in decades, starting tomorrow for the heavy stuff, but we’ve alreadh had snow and the 10 KW turbine is out there hitting 10 and 11 kW for hours. We’re supposed to get almost 8 feet of snow in nearby Wrightwood over the next 6 days, and the “sag” I’m concerned with now are how much snow the roofs of some of the many buildings I own around here will handle 2 or 3 feet of snow, if we actually get that much, which it looks like we easily could.

It is the first time I (and someone) evoked the natural severe limit of scaling of torque transfer devices due to the catenary sag effect which aggravates mass scaling penalty, leading to mass x shaft length penalty.

This is a simple fact from the real world.

You cannot justify your statement. I know lenticular ballons since 2010 and also I repeat I posted a comment about them, without any reaction from you, of type “it is my invention”.

You indicates to me a manufacturer of balloons which are not really lenticular balloons (http://www.skydocballoon.com/), on February 11, 2023, so far after my comment mentioned just above, and more than 10 years after I knew lenticular airships: see my knowledge of lenticular airships by Pierre Balaskovic in Royan 2010. And these balloons are not rotors including lenticular balloons like I invented, being able to prove the date (January 2022). You cannot prove anything about the invention of a rotor including a lenticular balloon, just evoking some "thoughts ".

Without any support, and claimed (privately or publicly) after my comments on this forum.

I knew that the inventors’ imagination was at work, but not to this extent, as for the following of your comment. You should write novels.

You have the wrong view on the catenary sag effect; it doesn’t prevent energy production as such, but it does prevent reaching altitude and scaling, unless perhaps you implement my type of rotor including a lenticular balloon.

But I believe the opposite may also be true; that your dreams may have been missing some important features of «The Pyramid». And if this is true, the whole «I thought of that years ago» argumentation becomes a bit moot

Tallak, I’ve been championing this stuff for well over 40 years, and without ever examining what you proposed closely, I’ve had versions using planes for a long time. It scarcely matter whether you believe it. If you look at my patents, they can go on for over 100 pages, with hundreds of different drawing figures. They don’t stop because I ran out of ideas, they stop because they are just getting to long to manage. Meanwhile, I often joke that “I suffer from CSIS: Can’t Stop Inventing Shit”. It’s like with music: I can’t stop coming up with new songs. They are pretty catchy. I’ve enjoyed the experience of driving down the road, turning on the radio, and hearing my band on the radio. It’s like guitars - walk into this place and you are surrounded by guitars. I keep buying more, because I seem to want one of every kind. Same with skis - two walls of skis - some of them never used - it;s just the way I am. Anyway, after a documented 46 years of inventing AWE systems, yes, I am ahead of most others. WHether someone wants to call something an airplane, a blade, a kite, or a wing, they are all the same basic concept here. The idea that new people will step in and show me something that was not already on my radar screen does not usually come true. That’s all I can say in your case.

Same with Pierre mentioning cyclic pitch control of blades as another aspect of rotorcraft that somehow I had just never stumbled across in 45 years of not only conceptualizing, but ACTUAL design, construction, and successful operation of such flying rotorcraft devices is also absurd. It’s one of the main features of rotorcraft. I’ve stated that my rotors for flying versions of SuperTurbine™ fly like gyrocopters. I live near El Mirage Dry Lake Bed, where there is a whole community of gyrocopter pilots who fly there. And as I pointed out, I was not just thinking about flying planes in a cirlce at the end of a string, I routineely did so recreationally over 50 years ago. These forums certainly have their limitations, All I can really do is say what I think. You will find I am a good source of information, and unlike others on these forums who have proven to be pathological liars and continue in that capacity to this very day, I defend the truth. Sorry if you think I never thought of flying control-line planes in a circle through all this.

Hello again Pierre:
You are starting to sound unstable. Half the time you are spewing complete nonsense here. As Roddy has noticed, you seem to emphatically fixate on some random thought for a certain period of time, then suddenly it disappears and you are fixated on some “new” issue. It’s starting to remind me of the worst of the worst people on these chat groups, and I think you know who I am referring to.

For years, you promoted your “rotating,reeling carousel” concept.
Now THAT was your original idea (as far as I know), a solution that I never even thought worthy of even trying to completely understand. Why bother - you said you understood it and that was good enough for me. I just took your word for it. I figured, "Let Pierre worry about the details of his “rotating reeling” concept, whatever it is exactly I don’t know, and I don;t care - if it is a good idea we’ll all know soon enough. So where is one today? Was it really a workable concept? Or just a bunch of highly-insistent internet BS from one more misguided wannabe wind energy inventor? While you were fixated on that, unknown to you, rotating lenticular balloons, as a concept, had already been looked into by me.

THAT “rotating, reeling” concept was supposed to have been your big contribution to AWE, ongoing for several years. What ever happened to that? Where is your first “rotating, reeling” prototype? I guess you couldn’t be bothered to actually build and operate such an “important breakthrough”?

Then your theme shifted to endless claims that AWE was doomed, because there was simply not enough space in the sky to support it. Well, I don’t see anyone giving up because of that. Nice try though.

Now you’re trying to chip away at little details of Roddy’s and my work, acting as though, as one example, mundane and common concepts like cyclic pitch control, or a rotating balloon, shaped and positioned to provide aerodynamic lift, have never occurred to anyone but you.

You’ve been insistently claiming SuperTurbine™ and Daisy are doomed to a few meters above ground, based on the few early,small-scale prototypes you’ve seen fly.
Yet at the same time you admit solutions to sag were in my first patent. It makes no sense. And now you mention scaling laws and driveshaft sag, as though you are the first to think of them. Completely delusional. Not sure what is going wrong in your head, and I can’t shift the focus of my life to addressing it, whatever it is. I hope for the best for you. Maybe take a vacation,to somewhere sunny and warm, go for a swim in the ocean or do a little surfing. Maybe your mood will improve.

I went to college for physics and engineering. You think I never considered scaling? Scaling factors are as well-known as 2 + 2 = 4 in Engineering. How many years did Santos go on claiming SuperTurbine™ was a non-starter due to scaling laws? And suddenly you bring it up in the last few weeks, as though it’s your “new, original contribution” to wind energy?

Are you aware that the ACTUAL wind energy industry has ALWAYS been considered to be at “the bleeding edge” of scaling laws, since the first windfarms of 60 kW turbines were operating in the 1980’s? And of course, that was near here, in Tehachapi, California. I know a guy still running them profitably since they were paid for long ago, still robust and reliable. Now turbines are up to 15 MW. And people are still saying they can’t get any bigger. They said that the whole time, since the original 60 kW Nordtank turbines were first installed.

Every time since then that a newer, larger turbine has come out, it has been said that scaling laws simply will not allow turbines to get any larger. EVERY TIME. And now, turbines with a blade span of 1/8 mile are being built and run.

Your latest technology-denial fixation has been to say I somehow have never appreciated driveshaft sag, whereas it has always been at the forefront of my mind, affecting every turbine I’ve ever built, and that no SuperTurbine™ of any sort could ever overcome your typical-but-wrong invocations of the mere word “scaling”, which has been said about every newer and larger wind energy device ever built.

And all this, even though you acknowledge that even my first wind energy patent indeed shows ways to overcome driveshaft sag, including buoyant rotors, and controlling the tilt angle of each rotor. And as I told you, I have MANY OTHER WAYS that I simply have not shared with you or anyone else yet.

Do you know why my buoyant rotors in the first patent look the way they do, with blades like inflated paragliders? Because it was easy to draw using CAD, and it served to convey the concept of a buoyant rotor in a visually appealing way that anyone could understand. It was just one part of a very long patent, which was NOT a full treatise on the concept of every possible way to make a buoyant rotor.

At some point you have to just finalize a patent and send it in for examination. You can’t just spend the rest of your life turning it into an encyclopedia of every thought you may have. Real inventors save some of their ideas for possible future development.

All I can do is tell the truth. I showed you a link to a manufacturer of lenticular balloons that I had contacted ~20 years ago, and told you the reason was to explore lenticular buoyant rotors. And as you have pointed out, those exact balloons were not quite right for being made into rotors, and as I pointed out to you, with regard to the extreme G-forces on ACTUAL high-speed spinning rotors, would probably not be strong enough, and given the extreme torture REAL rotors in REAL winds undergo (like the one I can hear outside right now making full power in this impending blizzard), it is a question as to whether ANY balloon could EVER be strong enough, but the point is, I was already considering such versions of MY ORIGINAL CONCEPT OF BUOYANT ROTORS 20 years before you stumbled across the same exact idea. 20 years. If you don’t believe me, I can’t help that.

But so many things you are saying lately seem so strongly based on negative emotions and disjointed thinking, and perhaps half of your statements lately do not seem to even make any sense whatsoever, to me anyway.

Over the years, I’m usually happy to see a message from “Pierre”, whether from an AWE chat group, or as a personal email. But lately it is getting a bit tedious. It seems that every day I get multiple negative emails from you, deriding SuperTurbine™ and variants thereof, or AWE in general as a concept, often claiming that AWE is hopeless and is no longer worth pursuing, and somehow I am then drawn into what turns into hours and hours of wasted time, humoring your negative thoughts and trying to “talk you down from the ledge”.

This has been going on now for the last several months. Honestly, I’m getting tired of it. And life does not have enough “extra time” to keep doing it. I have a life outside arguing with wannabe armchair wind energy inventors on the internet.

One aspect of these chat groups is getting sucked into the negativity of Santo-esque endless and pointless “arguments”. Life does not contain enough extra time to keep wasting it on such nonsense. If you don’t know by now, that I am a GOOD source of real information, I really can’t help you. I’ve been putting up with what has increasingly turned into mostly nonsense for quite some time now, and I need to move on.

Unlike some people, I have an actual life outside of sitting at a computer trying to reason with negative-minded nutcases all day, every day. Maybe you should look into some attention to your mental health. Perhaps winter has you shut in and bored, subject to bouts of negative thinking. Whatever the case may be, I think I’ve put enough time into fielding your questions and responding to your accusations. I have no more time for it, sorry to say.

We’ve had a lot of good interactions over the years, and I hope to remember them fondly and not let them be overshadowed by this latest tirade of negativity and accusations from you. Take a break, DO something fun for a change. Get yourself into a happy state. I’m not going to be here to serve as your whipping boy anymore. I’d like to stay positive and keep doing what I’ve always done, without daily harassment and negativity. I will always consider you a friend and I hope for the best for you. We all have times of uncertainty and doubt in our lives, I hope you make it through this crisis and come out the other side intact and happy. :slight_smile:

I struggle to find anything positive and coherent in what you say. I need to make some corrections.

Please stop distorting my words in the manner of whoever you know. I am saying something else, not prejudging what may or may not be in your mind:

See my reply just above concerning cyclic pitch control: clearly I am not taking credit for it: another inaccuracy to say the least.
Concerning the rotating lenticular balloon, I mentioned it as a possibility, but you attribute yourself this idea, while qualifying now as “common concept”, making a false amalgam with my so-called attribution of the cyclic pitch control you falsely state.

Some elements of prove please.

None of the torque transfer devices have reached a reasonable altitude in years. There are several possible reactions: mine, which is to try to find solutions, and yours, which consists of denying this simple fact, denying the cause (catenary sag effect as the device scales up), and finally denying the possible solutions when they arise, while attributing them to you.

I pursue to maintain that Power to space use ratio remains a largely underestimated issue.

And I’m not the one complaining every day about AWE’s lack of progress like you do by calling everyone an idiot.

I’m not going to qualify the rest of your rag, I don’t have the time.

Jeez
Cheer up everyone
As for my wee bit… it was my wife told me to use that inflatable kids trampoline for my first proof of concept for an expanding kite rotor, roughly 15 years ago.
Since then no change.
The ring is rigidised for launch.
Then in running it’s tensioned.
The profile gradually improved with iterations.
The simple folded over, sewn edge sleeves, fixed tight on the inside edges, to cuff a ring of tubes makes a great aerobie like shape
It may yet become actively expanded too.
What hacks me off is no one else reporting to have tried it
But hey chill
Just get on with playing with kites everyone.
And yeah we could all do with a bit of outdoor exercise it seems.
May help get the memory in order too Big Doug

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Would it be in any way realistic to think I never noticed, or had to deal with, driveshaft sag?

I am not going to argue with something I never said. There is no such “false amlgam”. I never said anything about it being a “common concept”. I said you are delusional to think I had never explored the idea. I do have proof, but I’m tired of talking about it with you.

Three times false. I quote again:

It is not only possible, it is a reality. You have no idea of the scale problem compounded by the catenary sag effect multiplied by the mass of the drive shaft. Not to mention the renderings, the first photo shows a set of numerous rotors where the first part does not rise. Did you mention this problem? No, to my knowledge. Did you compare the measured power of the many rotors with the expected power obtained without sag x mass penalty of the shaft resulting in its length x mass? No, to my knowledge. The only thing I hear in a daily basis is: “All roads lead to SuperTurbine ™”. If you don’t want progress in your concept, buy a parrot to repeat that phrase to your heart’s content. Also teach him to repeat “idiot, idiot, idiot” to the reeling people also in a daily basis. You will save your voice to make beautiful songs.

OK What I meant, to write more clearly this time, was:

[mundane and common concepts like cyclic pitch control]
OR
[ a rotating balloon, shaped and positioned to provide aerodynamic lift]
have never occurred to anyone but you.

Sorry for not being more clear in my writing.

It may be a product of exhaustion from trying to read through and respond to your ongoing multiple and redundant tirades, which never seem to stop interrupting the screen every time I look at the computer.

I actually have other stuff to do, so please give it a rest. :slight_smile:

The compound curve (not strictly catenary) of this particular prototype, involves a winch that serves to provide initial upward aim to the lower part of the driveshaft. If I were not aware of sag, I would not have installed the winch. The driveshaft sagged more when using balloons, which provide less tension (pull), but were a better choice in low winds. The driveshaft tends to straighten out when using a kite to elevate the Sky Serpent in higher winds, as you can see early in this video, including me cranking the winch to raise the initial projecting angle of the driveshaft. What is your point? It’s all engineering, or just common sense. I do not even understand your fixation on driveshaft sag, especially given that you’ve already acknowledged multiple ways to overcome it and been told there are many more ways.

Well you seem to be falling into the "All Roads Lead to SuperTurbine™ mode yourself. It’s all you’re talking about lately. I don’t hear you “parroting” your “rotating, reeling” meme lately. What happened to that? Gave up on it, like so many others? I guess it led to SuperTurbine™.

As far as “idiots, idiots, idiots” goes, I came from a group of REAL wind turbine people, in which everyone would have agreed that Magenn, for example, was a losing idea at a glance, considering it was just a more expensive way to build a Savonius turbine. It was long known, in REAL wind energy, that anyone promoting Savonius turbines for utility-scale wind energy was in fact, an “idiot”.

Then we have Altaeros. The WHOLE WORLD of AWE wind newbies were celebrating Altaeros “powering many homes in a remote village in Alaska”. You could still read magazine articles repeating this false story up until a couple of years ago. Meanwhile there was ONE PERSON who said “NO THEY ARE NOT!” Who was it? Me. Why? Because as a REAL wind energy person, I knew what works and what doesn’t. I knew they were either typical wind “idiots” possibly outright liars, or more likely they were just getting the benefit of an overly gullible and hopefull press (magazines and websites).

Where is Altaeros today? Supposedly retreated to offering wifi from an aerostat, a typical progression where they realize that they learned how to launch a helium aerostat and not much else, forgetting about wind energy and attempting something more achievable. Is it working anywhere today? Not that I’m aware of. Idiots? You tell me.

Back then, we were told that Makani would soon be powering “hundreds of homes” (or was it thousands?) and that, while laddermill had been given up on the moment it was revealed that I had actually conceived of the idea decades before, so they kept the name but abandoned the idea. Idiots? When, before or after “laddermill”?

We were all told that kite-reeling was the new big thing, and that all they had to do was “replace hardware with software”. That was what, 12 or 13 years ago? Have they not had enough time to write the software? To build the hardware? There is still not a single home powered by a kite-reeling system in regular operation, anywhere in the world, that we know about anyway. What’s the problem? Idiots? You tell me.

The question often comes up in life, often directed toward politicians and business scams: “Are they lying, or are they just complete idiots?” I don’t know. Maybe you can answer that one. I was just repeating the term commonly used by real wind energy people to describe the endless parade of crackpots, that started way way before AWE, and which may well go on long after.

Though one thing is about enumerating every possible option. Another thing is selection and where you apply your resources.

I will be clear that what you did figure out and the stuff you managed to achieve is very impressive.

Still, I don’t approve of the way you state that you have invented all AWE a long time ago, just didnt have the resources to implement all useful variations.

I still challenge you to somehow document how you have thought about «The Pyramid» previously. Once you did that, I could be challenged to point out inventive steps that you had not seen back then which would be necessary components of the complete design.

So you pointed me to hundreds of pages of patents. I looked at one of the earliest ones on Google Patents to find the one that would be most similar to «The Pyramid». This is what I found (Fig 85):

So lets ignore the part that is the solid part that is beneath the TRPT shaft.

Your design has multiple layers of kites. «The Pyramid» explicitly only has one layer. The reasoning for this is that this allows for a well described plan for launch and land that your patent designs are missing, as far as I can tell.

Another missing feature is the cartwheel. In «The Pyramid», there should be a cartwheel that has significant diameter to absorb the torque of the shaft. The cartwheel would be mounted at the tower on the ground as it is heavy and thus not lends itself to being airborne. The cartwheel also doubles as a place to park the kites in zero wind conditions.

You could say that you thought of using a plane for kite. But how would it be bridled? «The Pyramid» explicitly has only one bridle point close to the CG. This is not my idea, rather something I learned at Kitemill. But it is also a feature absent from yout patents.

Maybe you just dont think «The Pyramid» is a good idea and these design decisions are too worthless to write down. Thats ok, but in that case its a hard stretch to say you conceived «The Pyramid» years ago. To me «The Pyramid» is one of only a few interesting designs in AWE at this point if time. This at a time where some more effort has been made since your patent was written, by many people and groups who have presented efforts at different things, mostly failing or being just moderate successes.

Hi Tallak and thanks for taking a look at some of my patents. I’ve built and run probably over 100 different SuperTurbine variants, some as products manufactured in my “factory” (which actually exists yet we never issued a press-release over it) and sold to happy customers, a few shipped to Europe. Again, no big “press-releases” of “We sold a single turbine two years ago! Someday it may even be allowed to operate!” What a way to keep your shit in “new condition” - just never run it. One has been operating here continuously for over ten years, surviving through many severe storms, including this one that ended yesterday giving us 50 MPH winds and 5 feet of snow just up the road at a higher elevation, and about a foot here… All the turbines here ran the whole time without damage. I see a large branch out there hanging off a tree, and I’ll probably find more, and it will be one more project to clean up the mess.
Meanwhile the armchair inventors always have the same answer to high winds: We’ll just shut down the turbine whenever winds get really strong! Problem with that is you give up your most productive times when your machine can be running at a 100% capacity factor for days on end.
One thing you’ve got to remember is, there’s a huge difference between producing a few sketches, and having a successfully operating device. Everything looks great on paper as long as all you have to do is assume it will work perfectly as envisioned in a windfarm-class wind environment, or when wind speeds get even more serious, storms and turbulence enter the picture, etc.
I said was I’ve got plenty of on-paper designs that include airplanes on lines pulling in a circle. With plenty of features and aspects I haven’t exactly seen anyone else even approaching in their on-paper proposals… Yes you are right, I never looked very closely at all the exact features in what you were recently promoting.
It just kind of blows my mind how people think just putting some sketches on a chat group, and bringing up certain points like “center of gravity” mean you have the equivalent of a working system to then have arguments about, when nobody can see it run. What about “center of lift”? What about a million other details?
Every armchair inventor thinks they have everything figured out, as long as all they have to do is talk about it. When asked what they will do when winds get severe, the answer is always the same: “We’ll just shut it down!” Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Look, these chat groups can be fun, but they are only a chat group. I have an endless parade of real stuff to work on around here, like addressing storm damage as just the latest “emergency”, and trying to sit around dissecting every detail of whatever concept happens to come up every day is just not something I feel is the best use of my time and energy. I hope for the best for you everyone else. :slight_smile:

Well though I didn’t come up with Kitemill’s design, I was part of solving many issues to make it work as well as it does now. I think there are not many (ie less than a thousand people) who has my amount of experience with actually flying an AWE system. So I think it does not serve me justice to put me in the armchair inventor bag.

You could divert from my original point and rather talk about some doomed concept like Altaeiros or whatever. But that is really just avoiding my posts.

I said the cartwheel was there to handle zero wind, not high winds. But anyhow I disagree with you that it makes sense to produce in «infinite» wind. I would plan for bringing the windmill down in higher winds rather than making it strong enough to handle anything you throw at it.

I dont have the means to build «The Pyramid» right now. Somehow you managed to build your designs. Good for you, probably with a mix of dedication, hard work and some cache of money to pay for all the expenses. We are not all in a position where we could actually build prototypes. But it still makes sense to discuss ideas because if you can improve an idea at that stage, the change is very cheap. Mind you if the idea is ever actually built.