Kite Plans (opens in new tab)

What's the deal with the sketchy "PDF viewer" that they tried to force Chrome users to install? This is an example where a site actually worked better in Firefox and Edge.

Perhaps the limiting factor was the lack of inexpensive cameras, not the lack of drones. There was only a short window of time between when remotely controllable lightweight cameras became cheap enough for people to not worry about crashing them into rocks, on the one hand, and when drones became widely available, on the other.

The stability of that kind of platform is a severely limiting factor. The 3-axis gimbal had a lot to do with making aerial photography a thing as much as the drone itself. I was part of a group where we launched a helium balloon to ~90,000' with 2 GoPros attached. The footage is so unstable in much the same way that I imagine being attached to a kite would be. The weight of the camera is at the end of a length of "string" which essentially makes it a pendulum. It just swings and swings and swings. Oh, and it also spins as it twists up the tension in the string, and then releases to spin back the other way. Just about the time all of the swinging and spinning relaxes, the balloon reaches max altitude and bursts.

Kite photography is still used at some archaeological sites for aerial photographs: some countries, particularly in the Middle East, are wary of people using drones with cameras.

One of the lectures on YouTube from the Oriental Institute had beautiful pictures of early (Old Kingdom?) Egyptian military and trading sites on the Nile in southern Egypt or possibly northern Sudan, and described the problems they had and why they used kites.

Sounds useful but in limited situations -- open fields (so no forests) and windy but not too windy

Helium balloon would be a better option. Release it with other end tied to your backpack.

That's interesting. What would be the advantages of that over an ordinary sailboat?

Don’t forget the middle. There are many excellent spots for flying kites away from the coast.

One of my favorite kite shops is out of Boulder, Colorado: Into The Wind[0]

I’ve only bought from them once or twice, but I used to spend hours paging through their paper catalog as a kid. I also visited their shop in Boulder as a teen — that was really fun.

[0] https://intothewind.com

Maybe in market value with all the gear that comes with it, but unlikely by numbers. Regular kite festivals still draw massive numbers anywhere in europe and casual or kid kites are still at thing. Regular kites where really huge in the late 80s and 90s for some weird reason, with any bigger town in Germany having at least one dedicated kite shop.

Berlin last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILgXxSKhpbc

Fanø: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHM_DCpt0tM

All this without even mentioning places like Pakistan or India. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zSQruHvsvA

Why? It's not like this will be permanent, a few hours probably. And many sites exist without ads. What's there to support? A few dollars a month in fees?

Stuff that is old-hat to members of a subculture tends to be really interesting to people who didn't even know that the subculture existed.

The last time I flew a kite was in elementary school. I guess I knew in the abstract that people actually put thought and engineering into kites, but I never actually thought about it. Posts like this remind me of the enormous breadth of human hobbies, and they're really interesting.

As always, there's a relevant xkcd[1], and today, I'm one of the lucky 10,000.

[1]https://xkcd.com/1053/

It definitely meets the “satisfies intellectual curiosity” criteria for me! I think we’re giving it the HN hug of death right now (or my phone internet sucks here), but I’ll definitely be checking back later and maybe building one this weekend.

Kites are pretty cool and, as this site points out pretty dramatically, can go from super simple to technically very complex and interesting.

Apart from being fun, there is a good amount of engineering in designing kites.

For example, NASA has been experimenting with designing simple parachutes [1] and it turned out that the parawings (or Rogallo wings) are pretty good traction kites, too. The NPW kites are still popular kites as they are cheap to make and long-wearing in use.

[1] http://2e5.com/kite/nasa/reports/

It's neat!

> Am I missing something?

Yeah. you've been around here for a while, so i suspect you know the answer. But hey, maybe this will help. The first part is the boring answer

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. [1]

So anyhow, given you'd actively used the kite site it the past, you should be able to see how it satisfied your own intellectual curiosity in the past. Clearly, it's not relevant to you today, but perhaps you can see how it's relevant to others. Also, your experience can help drive some conversation with new kite makers.

the second part is some gentle advice - please don't take this as a criticism, just an observation. Try to take joy in other people being one of the 10,000 [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [2] https://xkcd.com/1053/

I'm curious what you consider on-topic.

I had never heard of the site. It's something of interest to me.