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Gigantic Aluminium Spiders (windspider.com)
84 points by geox 9 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 38 comments



The pictures of the Windspider Crane System on their home page give a good idea of how this is intended to work: https://windspider.com/


Might take the CGI with a grain of salt though. AFAICT the company has existed for 4 years, has 7 employees and no actual office address. They own zero physical assets. Seems most likely they're trying to do just enough to get some patents so they'll be bought out by one of the large offshore service companies and make a nice profit.


You know, I like giant industrial projects and all, but based on the headline I was expecting something a little more exciting.

Anyway, neat crane idea.


If you want something industrial, art, giant, and sometimes spider, there's always Storm King! :)

https://collections.stormking.org/Browse/objects

(It re-opens in April, if anyone happens to be in New York and hasn't visited Storm King, I really cannot recommend it enough, it's a lot of fun, Dia too, Earth Room and Beacon are magic but honestly they're all amazing, so fun! https://www.diaart.org/visit/visit-our-locations-sites)


I was thinking more towards the strandbeest series (https://www.strandbeest.com/), although those have entirely too many legs to be spiders and are also not made out of aluminium.


Nice, but sadly no arachnids in sight…


Storm King no, although they did for a while, but Dia, yes:

https://www.diaart.org/collection/collection/bourgeois-louis...

Storm King also had a Louise Bourgeois. To me, if we're talking giant spiders, it's always always Louise Bourgeois.


Indeed, this one is spectacular.


If you want industrial giant spider, Kumo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E1PpbncR20 is a must see. "Les machines de l'île" have other beasts of the same kind: https://www.lesmachines-nantes.fr/.


Super


You're not unreasonable for expecting something at least vaguely spider-like. This just looks like a big crane for assembling big wind turbines.

Is the "spider" part supposed to be the web-like aluminum frame of the crane? That seems like a stretch, but it's the most charitable interpretation I've got.


You gotta be the weirdness you want to see in the world! Let's learn to weld aluminum, and make our dreams come true.


For crane geeks, that _is_ pretty exciting. :)


> The self-erecting crane has no weight or height limitations and can be used in very windy locations

We have our space elevator!


Unfortunately not, there is no wind in space.


The crane requires wind? I don’t see that.


> We have our space elevator!

Out of context, that sounds like a kite. Can it be used in locations that are not very windy (like, for example, space)?


It braces against the tower itself, is for maintenance in situ instead of towing turbine towers to port for repair.


A "spider crane" is a particular kind of crane.


Indeed, but this company's cranes do not to my untrained eye resemble spider cranes.


Thanks, it looks like what I had been hoping for is called a "spider excavator".


Meanwhile, I was imagining giant weaponized mecha (either real or artistic), in the style of Spidertron from Factorio.

https://wiki.factorio.com/Spidertron


Me too. I’m disappointed. Also, I very much doubt “no height limitations” as I have yet so see anything without limitations.


I thought this would be about Kevin Smith's crazy Superman / Wild Wild West story before clicking.

I have to say… WindSpider is a pretty weird name for this. If anything I'd say it looks a bit more like an abstract bird/crane.


Totally underrated film that doesn’t get the praise it deserves.


I posted a link to some fandom before I saw your posts.


Floating wind turbines can power themselves, and therefore, as long as there is at least a little wind, and they have some small propellers on the bottom, get anywhere in the world.

That seems to make installation and maintenance super cheap - you can build them anywhere in the world, command them to sail themselves to the right place, and just have a ship come by and hook them up to the power grid in perhaps an hour per turbine.


Unless something goes wrong, and they crash into a ferry.

When edge cases become catastrophic, engineering gets hard.



Maybe they should have called it a "Web Crane" instead?

Or heck, even go for "Spider Web Crane" if they love the word "spider" so much.


Somehow I like the amount of syllabes were used to spell the word often referred to as aluminum. Its a more colourful word altogether.


> Solution scalable to over 1500 tonnes of effective lifting capacity, with no height restrictions.

Fascinating tech, very nicely done. I love it.


Why wouldn't it be better just to build 4 smaller wind turbines in place of the large ones. How does the math work here.


I believe power increases exponentially with scale. Essentially, Area = (pi) * r^2 (but much more complex given it's turbines).

This article has a good summary: https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/wind-turbines-bigger-be...

* 89ft - 0.2mw

* 173ft - 0.9mw (2x radius, 4.5x power)

* 410ft - 3mw (2.5x radius, 3x power)

* 820ft - 17mw (2x radius, 5.5x power)


Large ones are higher up and windy gets faster the higher you go. Though I think even if that wasn't the case it's more efficient to build a few big turbines than many small ones.


In addition to the other replies, bigger rotors achieve their power at lower rpm. That's because blade tip speed needs to stay well below the speed of sound, at all sizes. Where small, hectic rotations are annoying, the large ones appear majestic. They are seen very far, but blend in much better. The small turbines are the ones that are catching the eye.

You can spend many hours with a mix of different turbine sizes in view perceiving that difference without really being able to put a finger on it. But when you do realize how that plays out, you will never ever consider two smaller turbines where a larger would do. Chances are you'd even prefer a larger one over a single smaller.


I wonder how the infrasound from these affects whales and other marine life.


Came for spiders. Was disappointed.




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