it's not just a rope its a cable. my guess would be they have electronic control of a motor at the point where the lines from the kite converge to control the kite the same way us kite surfers to with a bar. they just don't need to extend the lines all the way down to the bar, causing extra drag, because they don't need analog control

Because it isn't what they want you to think it is. What it is, is a joke...

Pretty sure the sailors back in the day didn’t have the technology to do what they are doing here. This is sail boat on steroids. This weighs probably more than double of sail boats of the past. Very different

oh they do. you don't know the power of a kite until you've held one in your hands. not a toy kite a real kitsurfing one. those things are crazy you can go at speeds up to 110 kmph and get up to 114 feet of air jumping with them. they have so much force if you fuck up you can shatter the bones in your body when you hit the water. and that's for small kites meant to pull a single person these are much much bigger

this isn't stone age tech. this stuff is insanely powerful you can only really understand it when you hold a kiteboarding kite in your hands in 30 knots of wind and do your first power dive

XmanSully This isn't fake at all. There are plenty of videos on KZfaq and plenty of academic research on Kites for wind power, both sailing and electricity production. An average of 20% of the ship engine power is a common figure.

exactly, total fake. 20% more like 0.02% if any

20% of 100,000hp is a lot of horsepower for a simple sail. if your too stupid to figure that out then fine. hahaha

This is not a simple sail though. Simple sail operates at the ground level (much lower wind velocities), and are usually operated far from efficient way (with most traditional sails setups). This sail is working at 200-300 m above the ocean, where due to less friction and no terrain obstacles winds get much faster, 150km/h is nothing unusual. Now if instead of just "knowing better" you would actually check facts and do the math you would realize that 320 square meters sail with ~41m/s wind assuming air density of 1.2kg/m^3 will actualy give you around 340kN of force to work with (for comparison- RS-25, a main engine of space shuttle program was rated for 1,860 kN thrust- and that shit lifts heavy metal objects into low earth orbit so you know- it has some juice mkay?). Of course tankers are quite bigger and heavier than space shuttles, but in this case we don't really need to actually shoot them into the sky and beat the gravitational acceleration while at it so it should be all ok for providing additional power.

Because the total true cost of using fossil fuels is not being taken into account (e.g. we get to dump the waste into the atmosphere for free) it will delay the deployment of innovative technologies such as this. If we had a true carbon fee/dividend system in place every cargo ship in the world would be clambering to add this sail. Even saving 10% of the fuel costs (and creating 10% less CO2) would be a huge gain for humanity.

☹️🤣