I have already stated it several times JBTH, so it becomes redundant to make every detail each time.It's this level of clarity of language which makes this thread so concise and easy to follow.
I think what humber's attempting to say is that the cart will run off the end of the treadmill.
(a) The belt is the road. If the cart is moving at 4m/s AND the road is seen to move the other way, the difference is 8m/s between cart and road.I
But if you speed up the treadmill that would be equivalent to increasing the windspeed, and would be futile as the cart will just accelerate and run off the end of the treadmill anyway.
So 4.1m/s becomes 8.2m/s etc
But...the belt (road) remains at a constant speed as the cart moves faster the other way. And where would the observer be that can see (a)? It was a mistake to claim faster than the belt. If only WS, they would have got away with that error.
The cart exploits changing wind direction and height gradient. It's a sail cart that is inhibited by having the rotor oppose the wheel. At low cart speeds the pylons function as simple sails, while the rotor is too slow to do its thing. Nobody cares about how well it does that...A.T.
Recall what Steve Smith of NASA said about the albatross, and then this description.
Dynamic Soaring.
The
The higher you get from the surface, the less the wind is slowed by the ground.
So, if an albatross wanted to fly into the wind, it should fly close to the ocean surface, where the wind against the bird would be the slowest. That is what they do, and they also do something else, and this is the interesting part.
(Put the cart body low to the ground, and measure the wind as close to the ground as you can get away with)
Picture an albatross that wants to fly to the west, but the wind is blowing from south to north. The albatross is five meters in the air (a bit taller than your ceiling probably is). It points itself to the north and glides quickly downwind. It gains speed rapidly because it has the wind pushing it and because it is gliding gradually from a high position to a low position. After a long downhill glide with the wind pushing it, the albatross turns west, which is the direction it wants to go.
( Keep the same approximately downwind course, and let the wind change direction for you.)
It is moving very fast, just as you would be on a bike after a long downhill with the wind at your back. Conveniently for the albatross, the wind moving from south to north is slowed so much by friction with the ocean that the bird's flight is not affected much by wind (like we said earlier). Compared with the bird's speed, the wind is not blowing much at the surface. So, the bird can fly a long distance, maybe a hundred meters (the length of a football field) on the energy it got from the long downhill glide. It has not been flapping its wings during this time. Finally it slows down enough that it needs more energy to keep going. It could flap its wings to increase its speed, OR...
It could change the angle of its wings so that it rises up above the ocean surface where the wind is blowing more strongly, and grab itself some more wind energy by flying downwind again. During the downwind glide they pick up enough energy to fly some to the west and also to rise up into the wind again at the end of their progress to the west.
(...or turn a rotor that moves between the higher speed wind, and the lower speed wind. The gradient is always there.)
I said before the BB was even conceived that a momentum cart could work this way if "built to the max". Seems I was right.
The little cart is just a rag in the wind, and not at all like the BB. The TM is something else again, and the theory is not of this planet.
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