It's true that I was mistaken for trying to be the least bit tolerant of such an easy-to-debunk design.  As you pointed out, the tunnel made a weaker blimp.  Anyone could see it used twice the material to contain half the lifting gas.   So its main feature ruined it by 4x.  But that main feature was the basis for the patent, which was the basis for the investment...  Throwing good money at bad ideas...  I guess I was letting you guys' idea that we should give these teams a break and take their bad engineering seriously had temporarily gotten to me.  I guess I was trying to "go along to get along".  Let me retract any of that misplaced "niceness", and go back to "idiots, idiots, idiots".  I guess the main question now is YOUR OWN foray into DEFENDING them even while I had:

1) Told you that they were not in fact carrying out their stated project in Alaska;

2) Made a couple of phone calls to verify the fact;

YOU kept insisting, for something like at least a year:

"It's a delay!"  transitioning to "It's an engineering delay!"

You went to great lengths to publicly scold me for even suggesting that the entire effort had evaporated.

You and JoeF went on repeating their weak follow-on stories of working in Oman, working on a project with Mitsubishi, not to mention the weak supposed (predictble for AWE "projects") pivot to working on "wifi".

So however STUPID you think I may have been for momentarily losing my senses and giving any of these lying"projects" the slightest break, YOU have demonstrated TEN TIMES the stupidity you ascribe to me, because YOU kept defending them, defending their continued false statements, and making excuses for them, long after it was obvious to everyone they had "just given up".  You are right.  I guess maybe I was allowing your and JoeF's combined and persistent censorship to affect my truth-meter, since you two so actively favored untrue statements on your forum, and so actively tried to shut out the truth.  My apologies for not standing my ground.  My apologies for momentarily being "nice" for no good reason.  I will say one good thing about the Altaeros project: At least they picked a configuration and gave it a try.  Seems like the whole thing could have been done for about a hundred grand.  They probably spent millions.  Meanwhile, almost all AWE money continues to be wasted, while the simplest configurations are never even tried.  Unbelievable!

Here's a matching PTO generator, the groundgen is almost building itself-

daveS: I would summarize my honest position, after 12 years of this abuse:

1) Everyone trying AWE is clueless about wind energy, and will not see success.  It;s not my fult nd it;s not everyone else in wind energy's fault.  We just call it like we see it.

2) It's become apparent that even basic honesty is not present in many stated AWE efforts.  We see only false "good news" in the form of "certain" predictions of future activity, never the actual news which is that nothing is happening.;

3) Your own online activity has been unceasing, with you authoring the majority of posts on your "forum", yet, in my opinion, your 12 years of commentary contain little useful information, and no AWE solution despite your unrelenting shotgun approach of covering "everything", you can't hit the target.;

4) I have been forced by yours and JoeF's inconsistent censorship to have made certain positive-sounding statements just to bypass censorship;

5) My most consistent position, from the beginning, has been "idiots, idiots, idiots", and "You are watching "The bloopers"", with you as example #1, but you and JoeF often do not allow me to express my true beliefs, depending on your moods on any given day.

6) I think you've worn out your credibility.  Obviously, you love to post on the internet.  Beyond that, I don't think there's anything left to be expected from you.  There's nothing to see here folks - move along!  :)

So basically,

A few AWES patents have let slip or been abandoned lately.

Folks, I think you can safely ignore all you read below.  What I had jokingly described as "The Professor Crackpot Syndrome", as it is turning out, was not nearly sufficient to describe what you're seeing now.  Placing a Savonius windmill into a too-small wind tunnel and citing it as a breakthrough is like a kid with a cap-gun compared to a fully-armed urban assault vehicle spewing a poorly-aimed anti-aircraft fusillade of nonsense at the persistent reality of the actual world, in an internet-only attempted defense of his ill-defined defensive perimeter of his 100% self-constructed, self-confirmed, dog-chasing-its-tail fantasy-world.

Just a few weeks ago, this poster announced his "latest breakthrough" in the form of a kite repeating a "dutch roll".  The common self-guided figure-8 flying behavior of two-line kites was noticed and suddenly became "the answer".  I asked him to show how it could be used to generate electricity, the obvious next step.  He said that was indeed the next step, promising "You won't be disappointed".  "Sure" I thought, "like your concert that never happened"...

Since then, he has quickly backed off that promise, suggesting he should never be sked to produce any power, placing himself above that pedestrian task, more recently claiming his "research" is limited to "physical" stuff.  Well, that didn't take long, now did it?  So now after 12 years of claiming to be "testing everything" (the monkey at the typewriter approach), the basic theme in wind energy of providing a power curve or cumulative output figures has been entirely abandoned for a world of complete fantasy, where this person pretends mastery of virtually any branch of pop-physics, quantum physics, etc., pretending it applies to wind energy, pretending to be unfolding the future of wind energy, within a world only He can understand, with the idea of ever producing any power at all, ever, seen now as a mere annoyance.  I can't think of any previous wind energy crackpot having ever departed this far from the real world the rest of us live in.