How wind turbine power depends on blade length: looking at real data

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Wind turbines keep getting bigger every year. There's one main reason for that: the longer the blades, the more powerful the turbine. But couldn't you just install two smaller turbines instead of one large one? To answer this, let's take a look at real-world data.

Goldwind is a Chinese wind turbine manufacturer. Here are photos of their operating turbines from the company website:

Goldwind GW 82 / 1500 - output: 1500 kW (1.5 MW). Rotor length: 82.3 meters, meaning a blade diameter of roughly 41.15 meters.

Goldwind GW 171 / 6000 - output: 6000 kW (6.0 MW). Rotor length: 171 meters, giving a blade diameter of about 85.5 meters.

Even here you can already see that the relationship between blade length and output is nonlinear. The second turbine's blade is 2.07x longer, but the power is 4x higher!

Vestas is a wind turbine manufacturer from Denmark (their turbines are shown in the next photo):

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wind turbines

power engineering

power

energy

geometry

The real altitude of spaceflight

connected2u

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Humans have been flying to space since 1961 - that's over 60 years now. These days, we even have tourist spaceflights. In sci-fi movies, people travel between planets, stars, and even galaxies.

But what is space from the perspective of aviation and astronautics? Technically, it starts somewhere between 100 and 122 kilometers above Earth's surface. The range exists because different organizations define the boundary of space slightly differently.

Is 120 kilometers really that high? The average diameter of our planet is 12,742 kilometers - quite a lot. Below, I drew a simple picture to show what a spaceflight looks like to scale:

See that tiny red dot? That’s our trip to "outer space". Not exactly impressive, right? For comparison, the International Space Station orbits at an altitude of about 418.2 km - on this scale, its point would only be a couple of pixels higher.

Human technology is still in its infancy. Legally, we can say we fly to space - but in reality, it looks more like what you see above. As for interplanetary travel, so far, only our robots have made the journey.

Sometimes restrictions create beauty in architecture

everest

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Restrictions don't always lead to something bad. Let's look at the Blue Mosque in Istanbul - it is adorned with stunning patterns, yet there are no images of people or other living beings, because this is prohibited by Islamic norms. The restriction influenced the architecture, resulting in interiors like these:

Or take Amsterdam as an example. At one time, taxes in the city depended on the width of a building's façade, so future homeowners constructed rather narrow but tall houses. As a result, a distinctive Amsterdam architectural style emerged.

A Naked Gun (2025) reference to the TV series Police Squad! (1982)

parohod

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The new Naked Gun has one subtle reference that doesn't point back to the original film trilogy, but much further - to the TV series that served as the blueprint for all three movies. In other words, it's a nod to Police Squad! from 1982.

In the final scene of the new film, everyone around the main characters suddenly freezes, while the protagonists themselves are confused about what's happening - yet they're still able to move:

This is a direct callback to the endings of every episode of "Police Squad!". That exact gag happened each time - for example, here's how episode two ends:

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The Naked Gun

Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker

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