There's a lesson to learn from all this. The internet, and patent offices, are positively flooded with ways to reinvent how things are done. These seem to break down into two categories: Revolutionary and Evolutionary. Inventors of revolutionary devices will claim that their idea will significantly change life as we know it. Evolutionary inventors will claim an improvement in a limited area of interest. Inventors of revolutionary ideas, and their fans, will point to past ideas of similar scope and claim that since the one was successful it therefore follows that this idea must be likewise. Here's the kicker, while we can all point to successful revolutionary concepts, we can largely do so because they are so vanishingly rare. Steam engines with separate condensers, airplanes, transistors and lasers come around only so often. By and large, the bulk of useful innovation comes about in small increments. Just how many hundreds, or thousands, of improvements did the humble carburetor undergo before it finally reached a relative level of perfection? Just how long did it take for fuel injection to catch up and pass?
Even an idea as revolutionary as the transistor took a while to grab hold, twenty years after first invented it still hadn't totally displaced vacuum tubes because there were applications where tubes were simply still more capable.
The thing to keep in mind regarding the transistor is that it was a dramatic departure from past practice, there was little in common between the two other than some basic underlying principles regarding electron flow. Such a thing happens so very infrequently.
By contrast, most "revolutionary" ideas are fairly simple and easily understood. By and large they even make good sense in theory. There was nothing conceptually wrong with the Cyclone engine. All the basic elements stand up in light of basic physical laws. It isn't as laughable as the hundreds, or thousands, of engine patents claiming super high efficiency by eliminating a crankshaft due to the "well-known" loss of efficiency caused by slowing the piston to a stop and then accelerating it back to high speed. (These folks assume that the energy disappears when the piston slows and that you need to add more to speed it back up ---- in reality most of that energy is transferred to the flywheel when slowing and taken from the flywheel when accelerating, so the efficiency loss is negligible). If you could somehow make a compact boiler capable of producing supercritical steam reliably and introduce into an expander rapidly enough to prevent dramatic pressure losses and still allow for full expansion and then completely condense the exhaust all while building this into a cheap, compact, reliable, integrated system...then you would have a killer product!
It's that "IF" that's the killer. People fixated on the revolutionary "Big" picture far too often lose sight of the evolutionary "Little" picture that comprises the backbone of any workable product. There is both a naivety and arrogance underlying the assumption that one has pieced together a series of ideas superior to all others working in the same general field. Many of them are experts in very narrow fields that the big picture thinker may not even realize exists (think of people who do little else than develop camshafts, for instance) There are plenty of smart people working in product development; if an apparently brilliant idea is lying about, the odds are far better than average that people aren't touching it for good reasons. This isn't to say that there are no great new ideas, simply that they are very rare. Anyone claiming to have a product employing a bunch of them is going to have to work hard to prove it. The odds are certainly stacked against them being right.
I think I can summarize this by saying that any claim of "revolutionary", "game changing" or "disruptive" advances should be taken with a grain of salt. If the person, or organization, making the claims has no long track record in the field, the claims should be taken with an entire salt lick. The old adage that "It sounds too good to be true" is an adage precisely because it is correct so often. I hope people have learned from Cyclone that one should view any grandiose claims suspiciously and do extensive research (by that I mean critical analysis, not memorizing the inventors website) before investing. One should always be skeptical until enough evidence is gathered to make a reasonable case in favor of the claims. The more grandiose the claims (think of "One Planet, One Engine") the more likely the whole thing is going to be a turkey.
