p. - Nick's flung mass stopped his more massive wheel [including driver mass] as it did for your experiments - no one ever denied that wasn't the case.
What you fail to appreciate or see in experiments where a driver mass starts the wheel rotating [instead of hand spinning] giving it momentum, is that the flung mass stretches its tether because of Cp's [mass & inertia] - this causes an enormous tension or strain force in the molecules of the tether - this dissipates energy into increasing the internal Pe & Ke of the atoms in the tether which is slowly released over time as heat bringing it back to normality [thermodynamic laws] - this has been explained to you.
What you will never see is a rise in Pe of the system that would be proof of a gain in usable mechanical energy that could potentially reset the arrangement to self sustain itself - in fact it falls short due to frictions which also dissipate energy & is therefore a sub-OU demonstration.
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Kirk certainly is taking a shot at it, literally - it remains to see whether he will be successful - that will depend on whether his logic & deductions are sound or not - I will not discourage him anymore than anyone else but I do have a different point of view to him - experiments will prove either way.
EDIT:
Kirk wrote:Sure it does. That momentum velocity transformation produced that enormous ke. The momentum in the butt of the rifle is balanced by he momentum out of the barrel. Since that v is a result of a much smaller mass the ke grows to a very large value. That ke once it becomes potential energy now becomes something you can use.
I don't understand why this is so difficult to see.
Kirk .. complete the loop to USE IT then - use the high Ke from the speeding bullet fired from a rifle suspended on a pendulum rod to hit a second ballistic pendulum of the same mass as the rifle - complete the thought process - will the ballistic pendulum swing up & gain Pe equivalent to the Ke of the bullet plus highest Pe of swinging rifle ? - if Pe is greater you have created an OU model.
You will argue that deformation of materials doesn't allow full energy & momentum transfer & that's why there is no apparent gain in pendulum Pe to match Ke of bullet [not counting losses] - this is exactly what we're talking about [deformation losses is internal energy losses the same as the tether strain example] - you have to find a way to maximize the transfer to your advantage & so far no one has been able to demonstrate a usable mechanical energy gain - neither Nick nor pequaide for example.