Awesome.

[David Moser]

I love kites. I love ideas for generating power and energy. And I love
crazy mechanics sans electricity.

My first question: how do the kites stay aloft?(sorry if this was
already addressed and I missed it? In my experience kites generally
require a quite a lot of tugging-and-realeasing and responding to the
signals of the string in order to keep up. How does a machine mimic
these rather subtle motions?

[J Calvert]

Great questions. 

The physical interface points, that a human operator would interact with, are:

• The steering wheel
• The gear shifter on the bicycle drive train in the D/R
  
• The braking system, or generator drag adjuster in the D/R.
  
• A block and tackle for the brake lines on kite line guides (which I haven't documented or diagrammed on the site yet)

The third interface allows the "tugging-and-releasing" you describe, the fourth allows partial de-powering of the kite the same way a kiteboarder does.

I hope that at least kinda answers your questions which have pointed out some significant holes in the documentation on the site, which I'll try to fill in soon.

Keep them coming!

Thanks!
Jeremy