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DRAFT
Thermal Liberation- Join the Penguins
Blog Entry- Jan 31, '08- Its winter on the NW Pacific, high winds & a surf advisory, but i frolicked with fishes in a survival-suit tethered to a large sled-kite. Earlier, 10 miles away at the Chinook River mouth, generated tidal power with a 10" turbine thrust into the current. The day's gear, all but the kite was salvage, conveyed on bike & beach cart substantially along nature trails, a futuristic lark.
The survival-suit opens up northern watersport year around, as a joy-suit. When i first squirmed into one, alone in KiteLab, a claustrophobia kicked in- i had been swallowed by a tire logo come-to-life & almost burst outdoors to be rescued by a passerby. But i survived the survival-suit. This time, the sea's splendor kept panic at bay. Only after it was over did the eaten-alive feeling came back, especially one moment of terror when it seemed the lifejacket over the suit might not unlatch with the floppy witch's-teats that passed for fingers of the suit. That would only leave the whistle provided until, say, the fire dept. happened by. I knew too well a dirty secret of modern safety culture; the whistle helps victims die with hope, almost mercifuly, whistling away. The horror lessened, i relaxed; slowly my head, then body emerged, as from a womb.
The day stood on eternal time, on tide- & wind-time, not slave-time. It was freedom in the chaos of Fluidic Paradise, the morning ebb tide to make power & the subsequent flood tide to swim the Ocean, with west wind to pull the kite lee-shoreward.
Living large, yet modestly, in joy, a sustainable vibe; if only i had gleaned a quart of the amazing perfectly ripe, commercially wasted January cranberries, frost ripened to perfection, that i passed that morning. Oh well, next time.
The initial plan was to tether off a beach sign set below the tideline, but at the last moment i opted for tethering to a kite, as it would pull me out of the water actively. Hauling out withhelp from a riptide, against the kite wrapped once around my rubber armored arm, the kite was near crashing in the highwind as i let out line to save it. It was my key safety measure to drag me, or my body, back to shore, whatever, an enhanced overtow above the under tow, against rip.
The most powerful radical clown i had ever worked with, a real pro too, a volcano of dark cruel humor, Dingo, alpha-clown of ClownHouse, a legendary place. I'm grateful for his generous assistence to the kite mission, but the end was weird, turns out Dingo had a classic theme of comic failed inventions & the KiteMotor seemed like a good bet for a pathetic laff in that tradition, but it kicked-ass, it broke the script, it wasn't funny, a betrayal of total clowning, even hogging the Climate Convergence press, where ClownHouse had performed brilliantly, on the eve of extinction-eviction. After the rout of our haven, the end of ClownHouse, everyone scattered, times were tough.
Gradually i cobbled up a Protean kite-god lifestyle, on the same Pacific NorthWest beach where Capt. Clark "woke up under a wet blanket," I was technical-flying all the time, while feasting on wild King Boletes & berries in the fall, then discovering the lost harvest of winter cranberries. My utopian kite-bike commute began along the beach & continued on the incredible forest trail across Cape Disappointment, to the picturesque fishing village of Ilwaco, not far from the super-scenic Dismal Niche, where Lewis & Clark foundered, nearing the Columbia Bar, a watery wonderland dubbed the "Shipwreck Capital of the Pacific". The trick is all timing. There were 70 ft. seas & 140 mph winds reported during "The Storm" of Dec.,'07, which made all the normal storms afterwards seem trivial. The weather was in fact fine much of the time. It might rain, as forcast, a dozen times a day even, yet cheery sunshine predominating. It is sweet to dart about on missions & errands, the bike nimbly avoiding storm cells, running off in any direction the weather looked good. The stratosphere is lower here, the weather is fine grained, often tiny, the cool air is dense, good for wind-sport.
Went kite kayaking on Columbia, part of an anti-LNG protest. Flew peace sled, at first kept aloft by paddling in the light air or reeeeeling-in. As breeze built, tasted the divine indolence of downwind kitesailing.
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50 ft Pacific Neutrinos kite-sailing scrap raft, a giant kitesurfing board, underway in Ilwaco, WA
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Skysails' system can be adapted as a sky-tug pilot-kite for a big OL, or put this way- the OL used as a power booser to SkySails system, its kite reduced to a pilot, perhaps conserving actuation loads. The OL would have use of an up & running control system, almost COTS. Perhaps the OL should spin freely on a swivel or flown upside down to pull the system lower in the window for best pull geometry.
conjecture- An aerostat that might otherwise be driven to the ground in a storm might be kept aloft by a pilot-kite strung along its line.
| Sea-Kite Cultures A New Golden Age of Kite-Sailing How grand the sky, a cosmos actually, & its worthy mirror, the sea. To sail both mediums at the same time, opposing small tethered hydrofoils (paravanes) with large kites, is a material foundation for a highly sustainable glorious way-of-being.
Advanced modern kites barely approach the lift to darg ratio of this compostable stone-age tech Polynesian foil.
European sketch of a Maori kite shows amazing aspect ratio, superb stall stability with lower L/D tail, & tufted yaw stabilizers. The "head-in-the-chest" of this Maori Kite fits a description of American Pacific North-West Thunderbird The Art of Rigging Kite Trains "I posess certain secrets...in the way of Kite Flying." Sam Cody Victorian kite-master, cowboy Sam Cody, a cunning parallel Buffalo Bill, who claimed birth in Birdville, Texas, right-on the New World Twilight Zone. To explain himself he invoked a Chinese Yoda, a chuck-wagon cook encountered during the brief epoch of the great cattle drives, passing to the youth the very secret of flight, the ancient art of kitemaking. Below: Cody using his white stallion to pull against a human lifting Cody "bat" kite. The deep-cut catenaries sure look Chinese.
Don't take literally such Texas Tall Tales, where truth hides in a pack of lies. Something transformed Sam Cody into the original & foremost birdman in all England. In an Asian view Cody's Chinese Kite Master was Chang Kuo Lao, a Taoist Immortal, whose totems are bamboo & Phoenix Feathers (superior to kite silk). "It is written" Chang flys a thousand miles a day from a "paper mule" folded in his wallet (the original pocket-sled). Modern x-c paragliding records do about half that.Ancient wallets were huge, lunch fit in them. The smallest modern parachute, successfully landed [VX39, Cani, '04], was shipped folded in an overnight envelope. The Immortals are beings classed as Celestials, operating out of misty sky, as cells, & pass restricted airspace at will. Ts'ao Kuo-chiu rides a magic stork among luminous clouds. Lan Ts'ai-ho, a colorful cross-dresser with one shoe, in old times last seen entering a cloud, now returns at kite festivals & even Burning Man. Han Hsang-Tzu makes flowers grow right before your eyes, whether you want him to or not. Ho Hsien-Ku, aka Immortal Maiden, resides, etherealized, around mountaintops, whose big standing waves will serve aviation stratospheric elevators. Xu Miao is "Her Holiness Princess Ma Gu", of the Way of Infinite Harmony, a cannabis-cult high-as-a-kite, brutally repressed during the Cultural Revolution, now resurgent, if Wikipedia is believed. These characters are engineering a new diamond age, in the sky, under a radical ideology; kites as medicine for a sick planet. In the cosmic scheme Cody was a pawn, Chang Kuo Lao's mule & then some, an actual mule-skinner. Like Will Rogers a generation later ( & the sky claimed them both), Cody was an adept at Cowboy Rope Science, the ironic liberational legacy of subjugating, not wind, but something wilder- surging flesh, into strings & teams, with rigging- lariats, bridles, & harnesses. Kites also have bridles. Untied, they wander off. Pocock tied kites to horse carriages, a no-brainer. The wind is flowing horses, as proven by poets & songwriters ("ghost-riders on the storm"), themselves windy. What Cody discovered in the stick & muslin set-shop of his sleazy Wild West Show was a wing-shop. The theatric wing truly flew (a coup ignored by stuffy theatre historians) & the flying circus was born. Cody's singular apprentice was, believe-it-or-not, the legendary Viennese philosopher, Wittgenstein, then a fledgling aeronautical engineer from the new science-culture (who later sized up B. Russell's game & cut himself in, iconic dream-team of philosophical grifters). The kite game inspired Witty to concoct a high-dimensional philosophy of aeronautical design of "configurations in configuration-space". Below: Cody kitingsailing off Dover in light air.
*SuperKites, a new jumbo soft aviation, part cloud & moon-bounce, daintily trailing sea-dipped paravanes, self-sufficient, showing off any shore, prophetic apparition. SuperStrings Sailors know strings beyond cowboy art. Fisherfolk have kited the dark deep for ages. They are preadpted kitemasters, just turn their work over. Fishing tackle as kiting has float as inverse ballast or surface anchoring, with the sinker, an upside down aerostat, call it a hydrostat, lifter-kite to tug the tackle from the surface. Modern multi-line trolling is a good model for a flying kite farm. The broad-set booms are a kite arch along which kite trains are strung, each train terminates in a "cannonball" sinker, the inverse pilot-kite/main-lifter. Each train has multi-line secondary kites, line laundry, spinning spoon lures with hooks. A "haul line" on each train allows individual retieval, note to kite farmers. Bottom trawling rigs are big kites, composited paravane networks including "otter boards", kite ears holding the net apart, itself a vast drogue kite-tail, its upper mouth bouyant with floats, lower lip roller-sinkers. Chinese scholars of old classed the kite as an "auspicious thing", a queer orientalist way of saying kites rock. (Kites do make amazing music, kite-lines sing just like the atmosheric squeals & howlers on shortwave bands that inspired the reggae sound. Doubt not the kite-master's heart entrains to the sweeping kite's rythm in a pulsing windfield.) Wang Xiaoyu, a modern kite historian, writes like Borges who wrote like an ancient Chinese-
Wang relates Chinese tradition of kite development, first Mo Zi "wooden hawk" inspired by real hawks. "Hawk" in various Asian-Pacific languages is the word for kite. Possibly Mo Zi had knowledge of SouthEast Asian kites & reverse engineered his own, from slender clues, but enough to putter confidently. His apprentice, Gongshu Ban, Lu Ban to his friends, really refined the kite, as a "Magpie", based on performance accounts. Wang also repeats an old rumor- of lost kites in classic Greece. Its debated if the kite was an accidental discovery or the work of a genius who first derived a correct theory of kite flight & then built it. Surely both factors played. Tents, clothes, hats, sails, & fishing gear are fine elements for a kite. Perhaps the kite has the antiquity of the boomerang, of similar exellence & complexity. Ancient kites, if they existed, should survive in caves, or faintly traced in lava-ash or burial mould, or depicted clearly on an art object. SkySailing From Kite Trains to Line Laundry, the fall & rebirth of an idea. To fly a cloud of kite, Old-Timers ran it up like a modern kite hobbyist festoons a festival sled-kite line with "line laundry" (novelty spinners, streamers, etc.). In the quest for kite power many ideas failed- Kites flown close fight; tight kite stacks aero-interfere, stick captured kites are heavy; giant kites are a handling crisis. Cellular kites suck if the cells suck & interfere (although Bell did discover a cellular stability effect). Nicely spaced Kite-Train surfaces non-interfere. Below: G. R. Lawrence's Kite Train over San Francisco, 1906.
Tapered Trains Note the pilot kite at top, Some kite trains went from small top kites to large kites in sequence, others started with a big top kite as an anchor kite. Either strategy made kite power safer & more reliable as oscillations are dampened by an irregular or tapered train.
A kite train is drawn from a suitable kite "quiver" for maximum flexibility. PilotKite, MainLifterKite(s), StormKite, LightAirKite, DownwindSleds, etc.. Cody, started with a small PilotKite to establish the tether, & a mighty Kite "quiver" to hang off it. He developed a system of sized sliding rings stopped by sized cones. The following sketch depicts a helium buoyed Lifting Kite module for a modern kite-train
The faint kite-risers are lost in JPEG compression. The tail is a C-kite acting as a rudder- more control & stability, plus its added lift. The main wings 60% reefable by accordion pleating. The outer wing is a "hard" inflated bow that remains as a high speed fin in a gale, as shown vaguely below the 3/4 view. These buoyant wingtips might serve as pontoons legs holding the kite above the water, in zero conditions where a slight heavier-than-air condition is desired. The envelope has a slight wasp-waist to better blend wing-body (area-rule) & tuck away reefed wing.. A Dead Idea (idea replaced by in-water kite-towed-turbine.)- A roller furling spinner-kite module either as a passive traction sweeper or an electric generation module. Soon an ultralight ultrapowerful High Temperature SuperConducter-based generator will be available.
Kite-trains enable high power to be developed while keeping components at a manageable scale. For this reason- handling limitations, Clipper ships had so many sails.
The water-sled component, capable of full quiver operations, of a self sufficient kite tug is a Kon Tiki, after kite-fishing usage. Note race-track monorail, a complete oval around boat with high speed travelers.
The lenticular superstructure has low windage from wide angles & reserve sponson buoyancy. The out riggers are ski-like planing floats. The main semisubmerged hull is a large compressed &/or liquefied gas bottle, or more prosaically, lead-acid battery banks. Multi Trains Running in light-air favors adding a second or (more) train(s) that need to be kept reliably apart, oh how grand it would look. ...vast wind-nets wove of kite trains blowing around the edge of low pressure systems.
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| Revolutionary Seagoing "pop" content making it way to web- Sea-Kite Cultures Putting the gen in the water lets the kite be light & the denser water means a much smaller turbine can outpower a given wind turbine. Heavy batteries or compressed hydrogen gas cylinders charged by the generator also work out better in the water. A robot-ship based on a kite towed turbine could sail the Southern Ocean, the Saudi Arabia of wind power, cracking hydrogen & oxygen from water, liquifiey it for volume reduction & supply Antartica (or LA) with the fuel of the future.
An irresistable design path is the unlimited ribbon-wing proposed by Ansar Anders- Ribbon Wing work. When Dave Culp (the visionary lately uniting work-kite designers) called, i was pondering a free-flying Anders ribbon wing concept, miles long, that looped & curlled its way across convection or otherwise dynamic wind-fields. A ribbon's fickle twist must be tamed, a string-wing must unbow-tie & recover when twist happens. A solution is stabilizer sections providing aileron/elevon/flap-like control over AoA in realtime, resisting twist faster than it develops. Stabilizer networks- see finite kite theory ;^) The resulting design was a Dr. Suess thing, crazy bubbles flying more sail than any clipper of old, squiggly ribbon wings unreeled from Johnny-Quest kite-boats, pulled aloft by a pilot kite, a topline running back down to a paravane, like some porpoising flying-fish, hauled the great wiggling arch open.
reversible/neutral Camber Control Concept- a double airbeam in the form of two belly-to-belly wing ribs. A valve switched air supply shifts infaltion from one chamber to another
Penciled note above- "ram inlet better", needs explanation- that inlet naturally is more aligned with airstream, more of the time, by dynamic camber & trailing stabilizers. Passive-adaptive wings locally conform to turbulence, retain control & power and more quickly recover from twist (bow tie) A conformant wing might unbowtie by curing into a savonius form unwinding section. Paragliders explored this space, "bowties", & how to avoid them (hit brakes at first luff). Compliant aerostructures that seek local stability passsively. A reverse-curved leech/trailing edge helps. One might install little inflated rudderbooms all along extreme ribbon wings. Adaptive structural compliance of aero-stable elements- bending like grass...inflated structures that uncurl/unfold after turbulent insult.
going-with-the-flow, the key to wind shear
Glorified Kite Surf-Fishing Kon Tiki Inflatable Topside Fairings, Hull Socks, even hulks look fly. central envelope makes a LTA kite bow-tie failure resistent Captive, semicaptive, & free kites. Low/med/high L/D MetaKite (rigid or loose cellular kite) Fractal Cell Kite, multiscale self-similar, a cool entry on list of famous fractal patterns. A Kite Train has Metakite logic. Finite Kite Analysis, the Kite Field ;^) Restorative Terraforming-An underwater paravane laddermill in ocean currents can serve as a thermal/material conveyor. A Jacob's ladder sled kite paravane laddermill could be all soft, suitable for the required spool/winch handling 1/100 scale (model scale) => 1/10 scale (yacht scale) => fullscale (shipping scale) scale time & money laws? the budget/time history of a small project helps predict large dynamics. At 1/100 scale, a child's realm, hand-operated kite models cheaply & readily explore concept spaces. Proof-of-concept comes easy. Tenth scale develops operational parameters at a modest human scale bordering the monstrous fullscale prototypes confirm scale work & lead directly to production. The Steuergondel is the dangling Control Gondola containing line actuators, battery, instruments, control electronics, etc.. Towkite-Zugdrachen, Control Lines (kite risers)-Steuerleinen, Towline-Zugtrosse, Launch/Retrieve System- Start-und Landesystem, Winsch The marine environment eats anything unprepared. Replacements must be carried at sea. Specify ruggedized versions of standard components. Industrially proven hostile environment components typically cost 50-100 percent of consumer grade components, both of which have gotten cheaper, as have marine components. On the kite specify lightest component & custom ruggedize as needed. ultra low draft (5 cm) riverboat Under slackerly construction in Austin, designed to drift 400 miles down the Colorado River to Gulf Coast & then do unlittering along the vast shallow Lagunas. Deck modules slide off to form multi-function mini-flotilla. A light long canoe built from the riverboat material could enable speed kite-sailing. Note the overhanging sponsons giving the riverboat roll stability at the cabin section is also the pontoons of a "saucer" water trike. The circle in front view bow is two plastic 55 gal. drums for water, the limiting factor along the "desert" barrier-islands.
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Left: A great kite-wall flying from a flotilla of robotic inflated ships towing turbines in the Southern Ocean, returning laden with liquefied hydrogen, or doing many other jobs like grinding & milling. Kitelines drawn shorter to fit page. |
traction-kiting enabled by open sea-way, Floating Neutrinos as early adopters.
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