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Soft SkyMill

The SkyMill is a leading concept in AWE, a pumping autogyro rotor. Patented variants included stacks of rotors as a kite-train scaling method. The rotors were supposed scale-limited according to conventional rotor construction, but what about "soft rotors"?

A giant looping soft-wing like, say, a parafoil, operates as a "soft autogyro", however lop-sided and disguised it may appear. Therefore, a Soft SkyMill is a second scaling path to trains. A giant soft-rotor unit of this sort could measure at GigaFly scale (>1000m2) and sweep a frontal area roughly 10x greater (for minimal bypass loss).

The COTS GigaFly parafoil scale is roughly 10MW rated (extrapolating from SkySails data), so a stack of such soft rotors could sum a huge amount of power. A Mothra arch could host dense-array of Soft SkyMill Trains crosswind, as a plausible GW scale AWES concept.

Comment and development of this topic will be occurring here.       
All, send notes, links, drawings, papers, videos, plans, safety-critical findings, and photographs!

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