Kite-Powered Ship Launched

The Grand Poobah writes "The big-kite technology we discussed last month has officially launched in Hamburg, Germany. Reuters has a writeup of the new technology, which aims to cut fossil fuel use on sea voyages by an estimated 20% by means of a huge computer-controlled kite. The link includes a video."

Comments

It's called reinventing the...

[Black Parrot]

sail.

Re:Everything old is new again

[evilviper]

Sometimes, it seems, there are no new ideas. As others have said, what we have here is a glorified sail.

Not really. It might be closer to a windmill than a sail... The idea of using the wind for power might be millions of years old, but new ways that do it several orders of magnitude more efficiently, and in significantly different ways, aren't the same tech by any stretch of the imagination.

This is a lot closer to a kite or a parachute. The ONLY similarity is has with a sail is that it happens to be powering a boat in this case. Far more differences than similarities, and I don't hear anyone complaining that sailing ships were just rip-offs of kites...

Eliminating the huge weight, manpower, and most of the wear that was inherent with sails makes this a vastly different product that could well have been a revolution in naval technology (exploration, trade, warfare, etc.) if it was around in the 16th century.

With wind turbines and electric cars you have a point that they aren't really new inventions, but they certainly have been VASTLY refined. In other words, a rocket that can fly to the moon and back isn't an over-sized bit of fireworks, but it's easy to oversimplify anything until it sounds trivial... Hey, a 3GHz dual-core computer is just a bunch of electric switches, and they had those in the 1800s.

This 'kite', however, is decidedly new, by any reasonable metric, and I look forward to seeing if it's actually practical for commercial use on a large scale.