Scouts first. Harvesters at the proven sites. Kites for the slow flows nobody else can reach.
The Axial Labs ocean fleet is three layers, one protocol. Cheap self-starting scouts map the resource for six months. High-efficiency ducted propellers take the proven high-current sites. Velocity-multiplying kites turn slow currents into viable power. Every node reports to CommandCC, every packet is compressed, every anomaly is flagged by EMPIRE1.
20 units across Indian Arm, Howe Sound, Active Pass, Porlier Pass, Burrard Inlet narrows. Self-starting. Zero maintenance. Purpose: map tidal resources with 30-second velocity resolution across six months.
15 ducted horizontal-axis propellers at the top five sites identified by scouts. Highest-efficiency technology available (Cp = 0.55 to 0.60). Three units per site, shared subsea cable, shared shore station.
8 autonomous hydrofoil kites at two low-flow sites where stationary turbines are not economic. Figure-eight flight, open-source autopilot, velocity multiplication turns 1 to 1.5 m/s currents into 20 to 30 kW per unit.
Scouts go first. Cheap, disposable, self-starting. Drop 20 across Indian Arm, Howe Sound, Active Pass, Porlier Pass, and Burrard Inlet narrows. Each one sits on the seabed for six months measuring current velocity every 30 seconds and reporting via cellular. CommandCC aggregates the data into a tidal energy resource map of the Salish Sea. Total investment: $80,000. You now know exactly where to deploy the expensive hardware, backed by six months of real measured data, not theoretical models from Canadian Hydrographic Service tide tables.
Harvesters go where scouts proved high-current sites. Ducted horizontal-axis propellers. The highest-efficiency technology available. Deploy in clusters of three at the top five sites. Each cluster shares a single subsea cable to shore and a single shore station. The duct is our competitive advantage here. It is manufactured in BC using the same pipe fabrication and composites skills we developed for the in-pipe turbines. The duct is a pipe, shaped as a venturi. Our manufacturing scales directly from in-pipe to ocean.
Kites go where current is too slow for stationary turbines. Sites with 0.5 to 1.5 m/s currents are worthless for ducted propellers but viable for kites due to velocity multiplication. These sites have zero competition because nobody else can extract energy from them economically. The kite autopilot is an adaptation of open-source ArduPilot and PX4, running on commodity flight-controller hardware (about $200), programmed with a figure-eight trajectory generator. CommandCC manages the flight paths and deconflicts multiple kites at the same site.
Every unit in all three layers is a node in the same fleet. The same registration handshake, the same compressed telemetry format, the same EMPIRE1 anomaly detection, the same maintenance scheduling. One protocol for 88 nodes.
