Remember Terrain-Assisted AWE? The concept has far wider potential than first envisioned. High terrain was the obvious opportunity, but even low terrain with slightly elevated anchors, like levees and mounds, will serve to create robust aerial infrastructure for HAWP.

Consider a land or sea surface laid out as a matrix of winches, a "winch-field" multi-tethered to a common mesoscale airborne mesh; a "tethered-mesh" able to fly to great height, but whose default state is to rest stretched above the surface. Lifters such as; kites, LTA, and rotorcraft, as well as payloads of all kinds, would dock as needed anywhere on the mesh. Such well-constrained infrastructure would fly powered by wind (or from stored power in calm) taking off and landing in an orderly deterministic sequence.

This basic method allows any lift or payload technology to be applied over any geophysical surface.

• CoolIP *                      ~Dave Santos                 Oct 15, 2012            AWES7525

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  • Planetary exploration example: stretch long science-platform cableways using terrain like Mars' Valles Marineris. Hosted vehicles could traverse long distances along cables over "impossible terrain", lowering sensors to the surface anywhere along the way. During wind events, the cables could host kite-based vehicles able to rise to considerable altitude and range far cross- or downwind, even laying new cableways.       DaveS
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