Kite Plans(kiteplans.org) |
Kite Plans(kiteplans.org) |
Rule of the internet: don't install things that you didn't ask for.
More details here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kite_aerial_photography#Pica...
One of the lectures on YouTube from the Oriental Institute had beautiful pictures of early (Old Kingdom?) Egyptian military and trading sites on the Nile in southern Egypt or possibly northern Sudan, and described the problems they had and why they used kites.
IIRC A kite powered boat called Jacobs Ladder held various sailing speed records at one point
0) https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81LstaapceL...
Takes a while to get the hang of troubleshooting the problems of flying, but the basics aren't complicated. Good cheap fun.
No kitesurf kites though, probably the most popular kites on the market now? Maybe in the west, not sure about the east.
One of my favorite kite shops is out of Boulder, Colorado: Into The Wind[0]
I’ve only bought from them once or twice, but I used to spend hours paging through their paper catalog as a kid. I also visited their shop in Boulder as a teen — that was really fun.
A couple years ago I wandered past their store in Boulder and was floored that there was a real, physical incarnation of that magical catalog. I took my little kids there this winter and it was like passing a spark between generations.
The kite survived that & flew fine on later occasions. Now that she's seen it fly, though, she has lost interest in kites that won't fly.
Berlin last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILgXxSKhpbc
Fanø: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHM_DCpt0tM
All this without even mentioning places like Pakistan or India. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zSQruHvsvA
I suppose I expected something more akin to "Kite Plans, Experiments, Observations, and Results that SoAndSo ran" or "Specific Kite Plan and Notes" to be linked on HN.
If you're new to kites, good news, it's a lot more fun than it should be.
--- Original Post: I am confused, why this link is on HN?
I enjoy kites and have used this site before, but what makes it worth the front page of HN? It's nothing new, their site hasn't really changed in years, and it is somewhat off topic.
Was the poster just fired up about kites? Am I missing something?
The last time I flew a kite was in elementary school. I guess I knew in the abstract that people actually put thought and engineering into kites, but I never actually thought about it. Posts like this remind me of the enormous breadth of human hobbies, and they're really interesting.
As always, there's a relevant xkcd[1], and today, I'm one of the lucky 10,000.
Kites are pretty cool and, as this site points out pretty dramatically, can go from super simple to technically very complex and interesting.
For example, NASA has been experimenting with designing simple parachutes [1] and it turned out that the parawings (or Rogallo wings) are pretty good traction kites, too. The NPW kites are still popular kites as they are cheap to make and long-wearing in use.
> Am I missing something?
Yeah. you've been around here for a while, so i suspect you know the answer. But hey, maybe this will help. The first part is the boring answer
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. [1]
So anyhow, given you'd actively used the kite site it the past, you should be able to see how it satisfied your own intellectual curiosity in the past. Clearly, it's not relevant to you today, but perhaps you can see how it's relevant to others. Also, your experience can help drive some conversation with new kite makers.
the second part is some gentle advice - please don't take this as a criticism, just an observation. Try to take joy in other people being one of the 10,000 [2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [2] https://xkcd.com/1053/
I have been wanting to try it again using a swivel in the line to allow the balloon to spin freely, but then use a tail/fin type of attachment to keep the rig oriented. It seems like anything would have to make it better.
Edit: I see I’m getting downvoted a lot for this comment. I appreciate creating content for the love of it might seem like an alien concept to many HNers but not everyone is driven by the motivation of turning every hobby into a start up. In fact once upon a time, in an era before Facebook and Google, the majority of an average persons surfing time was spent on non-commercial personal web sites.
So I don’t know why you’ve gotten downvoted, but your comment rings true for me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bermuda_rig
If you're not familiar with sailing rigs, you probably don't even notice it as anything other than, "that's what most modern sailboats look like." This is precisely because it is a extremely efficient at sailing upwind. And their fastest speeds are roughly doing perpendicular to the wind.
Boats like you see in pirate movies and such have what is called square rig. These boats will sail their fastest downwind, but struggle much more in other directions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_rig
EDIT: So I just realized that the Wikipedia article does not have a great explanation on the actual physics here. I'll do my best, though this is all subject to my (mis)understanding.
Obviously, just putting a sail on a raft with no other modifications will just push your raft downwind. You have some ability to control direction with the rudder, but that's it. To sail perpendicular, you need to start leveraging other forces. The main ones are lift force from the sail shape, and drag from the centerboard. [0]
Bermuda rigging uses a triangular sail that is rigged along the axis of travel. (Compare to square rig, where the sails are perpendicular to the axis of travel.) The sail has enough slack that, as wind fills it, it curves. The sails then begins acting as a vertically-oriented wing, using the airflow over the surface to generate lift -- though, in this case, the lift pushes the sailboat sideways.
So you have the wind attempting to push your boat sideways... That is not helpful for moving forward. Enter the centerboard, which resists this push by simply increasing the surface area of the boat under the water. In order to move sideways, the water has to be moved. So you have two opposing sideways forces, and the result is a bit like pushing a wedge -- the boat moves forward.
Also of interest in the physics is speed. So a boat sailing downwind can never go faster than some fraction of the wind speed. Because if it was, the apparent wind would either be zero or a headwind. However, a boat moving perpendicular or upwind can actually move faster than wind speed, because it is utilizing more forces than just the raw wind. And, in fact, the faster a boat moves upwind, the faster the apparent wind is, moving it yet faster.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centreboard
Really small boats might get away without one. For example, a Hobie Cat (around 16 feet) is using a combination of its hull and a large rudder surface to achieve the same effects.
Wow. I couldn't get over how flat the thing sat in the water... no heeling at all. I guess that is a joint property of removing the mast (ie. reducing unnecessary vertical offset prior to thrust distribution across the hull) plus curved foils / mini-keels visible a the start and end of the video. Impressive stability given the low profile in the water.
