End flights out in the water; then sail away.
New sector of Torrey's future?
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After designing and crafting as needed:
have a hang glider (HG) that ends its flight on the surface of a body of water;
then have the pilot morph (as pre-designed) the materials of the HG into an effective water-surface sailing craft. Presto: HG-to-WS

Your designs and ideas toward this design space are invited. Rough efforts in history are invited to be placed on the view table herein. Critique the ideas whenever it seems helpful, or just when you flash a note that concerns you. On designs: how excellent are the water sailing characteristics? How good is the tacking operation? Safety matters.

Why do it? Also, bring up items of motivation on this matter. Why go to the effort to have such a morphable system? Perhaps you won't use the HG-to-WS, but you still might want to state why someone else might aim for having an excellent HG-to-WS and use it for their reasons; what reasons might others have? Guesses are fine. Describe the scenes of choice where HG-to-WS just might play well.

Primitive: Pontoon the aft wing tips or have the wing tips as actual inflatable parts. Have pontoons as gear at basebar of control frame. Alight on water and try to control the sailing of the arrangement. Any reports on that circumstance?

Advancing … from the primitive is the subject of this topic run. What is the best we may come up with for HG-to-WS in the few months left of 2012? Then what will be the best for 2013? Then 2014? Etc.



Which tactics might bring neat solutions? Look at sailing craft and work backwards into morphing a HG out of the materials? Look at niche hang gliding designs and work toward morphing those materials into an effective water sailing craft? Some hybrid creative strategy? Maybe someone has a really effective solution already (if so, that could be placed in this discussion space!!!)










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Some notes to put in the motivation space:
* Region of a thousand lakes and ponds … Many more LZs !!!
* Sail to various points of a lake following a hang glider flight.
* End HG flight to offshore places to avoid seashore beach users.
* Advanced: Once ending flight on water surface and sailing some, then a further challenge more refined becomes a different topic, barely then only mentioned here: Set water drogue to anchor against breeze; self-kite the rig; depower the water drogue once main HG is aloft and reel the depowered drogue up to HG pilot hold. Fly as far as one might and repeat the cycle. With fishing gear, Vit C, perhaps fly cross sea or ocean.
* Open more launches near lakes, seas, ponds, oceans … with the proviso that the LZ is the water's surface, even mid-lake; morph and sail on the water surface.
* Redundancy for safety for ocean boat-towing: The HG-to-WS that might be boat towed far out to sea or large lake: In case the towing boat cannot be part of return operations, then the HG-to-WS could sail long distances.
* Make the water-surface landing. Morph to sail. Sail to offshore wind farm or kite-energy farm. Perform maintenance on the wind-energy systems. Camp out offshore. The systems may have stored energy for use in winch towing up the HG-to-WS to good altitude for launch; then the HG-to-WS flies back to shore for some R-and-R.