Hold my beer, I got this

I thought I would add this image in case anyone was curious (yeah right) and didn't want to wade through the entire page I linked to above.
This is an idealized look at the instantaneous system voltage for a Kz with a 3-phase permanent magnet alternator, and electronic ignition. The ignition affects the voltage by pulling down the voltage in a downward ramp as each coil charges. The electronic ignitions, near idle, apply dwell for very roughly about 1/4 of a crank rotation. If this were a points bike, the ramp would be for about 1/2 of a crank rotation.

This is the cleaned up version of the image posted earlier, but not including the shunt events.

Thanks for linking that site loudhvx (is it yours?), there's a huge amount of useful information there. Also very interesting to see the waveforms from a bike charging system, I've only ever done so with a car, and the much larger battery seemed to reduce the ripple a little more than this.

Yes, that is my site. Thanks for the compliment.
And yes, that is true, a car type regulation system will have less overall ripple.

A car type regulator (also used on a few Kz's) only has ripple from the tops of the rectifier pulses. The shunt regulator, in addition to the normal ripple, has a much larger "ripple" from the shunting. When a shunt regulator induces a shunt, it is temporarily losing control of the overall voltage by creating a brief "dead spot" in the voltage/current from the alternator.