lurch

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Gear

  • Main Canopy Size
    120
  • Reserve Canopy Size
    120
  • AAD
    Cypres

Jump Profile

  • Home DZ
    Skydive Pepperell
  • License
    D
  • License Number
    27583
  • Licensing Organization
    uspa
  • Number of Jumps
    2750
  • Years in Sport
    12
  • First Choice Discipline
    Wing Suit Flying
  • First Choice Discipline Jump Total
    2500
  • Second Choice Discipline
    Wing Suit Flying
  • Second Choice Discipline Jump Total
    200

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  • USPA Coach
    Yes
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  1. Concrete Rebound Hammer will make you wonder why you haven't ever crushed a human skull, with your bare hands! Concrete Rebound hammer is the glitch in the Matrix you've been waiting for! Concrete Rebound hammer is never void, even where prohibited! Do not bend, spindle, fold or mutilate Concrete Rebound Hammer! With Concrete Rebound Hammer, you CAN touch this! Concrete Rebound Hammer should not be transported in any model year of Volkswagen Bug! (Shipping via stick insect is available in the US Virgin Islands, and all other islands that have had sex at least once in their lives.) Concrete Rebound Hammer is on a World Tour that's banned throughout the world! Concrete Rebound Hammer is compatible with neither Windows, nor Apples! (Do not use Concrete Rebound Hammer on doors or grapes. Pears and oranges are fine.) Also, Linux is right out. Concrete Rebound Hammer has NO cholesterol! Concrete Rebound Hammer is neither Vegan nor gluten free! Concrete Rebound Hammer is available in bottles, cans, and cute wicker baskets made by the hard working indigenous people of... someplace! Concrete Rebound Hammer is back like a vertebrae! Concrete Rebound Hammer will NEVER DIE! FUCK, YEAH!!!!! Wooooot! -Lurch
  2. Concrete Rebound Hammer may skip when subjected to shock. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.
  3. Took me a bit to realize my sense of humor should be handling this. The correct answer is, no, you haven't seen the suit. You've seen a picture of the suit. Your opinion and credibility will be given equivalent weight to your knowledge and experience with a suit that size. There being only one of them, which you have never actually seen, by all means, please, tell me all about it. I wonder if Luigi had to put up with this crap? -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.
  4. Nope. Once you get used to it, it is surprisingly not-awkward. Flies just fine with airlocks open wide with little pressurization, (just gets a very wide fallrate range, makes it easy to fly it dirty with a flock) and flies like a dream with the airlocks totally closed, although fully closed renders it almost impossible to fly with other suits. I've had jumps where the fallrate never topped 38 mph whether I was trying to fall slow, or not. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.
  5. You haven't seen the suit, have you? -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.
  6. Have you ever tried to measure the surface area of a 3 dimensional object the size of a very large wingsuit? You'd need a nailgun to get it to stay put enough to measure properly and that doesn't count curves. Now let's see you do it on a suit wide enough to hang off both sides of a queen bed mattress. When it was stretched out on the floor at Zhills, we took a Petra 69, folded it in half, and laid the Albatross II over it. It hid the entire canopy. We all looked at it and went, shit, that'd be a 35 square foot freakin' suit! And let it go at that. Roughly measured by yanking various chunks of the suit flat and throwing a tape measure across it, the thing is at least 6 feet from shoulder to tailtip, 5 foot 5" maybe 5 foot 6"wingspan gripper to gripper depending on how tight you've got it pulled, and some additional surface area added forward of the shoulders by moderate forward rake. It takes the form of nearly a square with a bunch of minor detail features hanging off it. The grippers alone were 21". Best estimate given crude and unsophisticated measurements and available evidence against a canopy, I'm callin' it 33-35 square feet not counting me face. You wanna argue with it, you come measure it. 6x5 would be 30. The A2 was 6x5 plus a bunch of big chunks of change when inflated. The A3 makes even that look small. We lost some wingspan by making the forward rake, but made up for it in sprawled-out inflation, hung a lot more wing both forward and aft, on 24" grippers. There's spots where the thing is almost 7 feet from gripper held forward of my head to tailtip, and counting cell slack, stretches almost as wide as the last one did. In the A3, the leading edge point of the aircraft isn't my head, it's my hands. The body position is a cross between flying squirrel and Superman. I don't GIVE a damn exactly how big it is. Just WHAT it is. If the mechanic plays out as well as the last two did, the Albatross IIIa Expansion Pack gets built. The body position the A3 is built around, was done to enable supporting much, more wing area than even this. I'd like to see if I can push this to the mid-50's, low-60's. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.
  7. The goal is to develop a suit that flies like a canopy- in every way.
  8. 5 foot 10". If you're wondering about the 35 square feet, it's simple. We folded a Petra 69 in half and laid the Albatross II over it. The Petra disappeared. The A-II was more than half the size of a 69 even without being pulled totally flat. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.
  9. Next couple of weeks. We spent the better part of two years hammering this one out on paper. Jake absolutely nailed it in one shot. The fit is perfect. The grippers drop into my hands just right. The toes go exactly as tight as I want them to, when I want them to. The wingspan matches what we mapped out, so perfectly that at full span, I get exactly the tension in my thumbs holding the grippers just by fingertips, that I wanted. Best estimate is 38-40 square feet. The last one was a solid 35. This is... more. A lot more. Feels totally flyable. The last one was. This was entirely designed around a skillset I built up over the last 4 years flying suits almost that big. The suit looks insane, but it's the apex of a very long and patient growth curve. Should fly like a slightly baggy Albatross II, with improved range of motion and a much bigger wallop when flared. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.
  10. Not anymore, it's not. The Albatross III exists. The Albatross II is no longer the biggest suit in my fleet. Not even close. Use your imagination. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.
  11. What's the latest on that guy Antoine anyway? Any.of these things work, put any mileage on em? I'd love to know how some of his creations flew. He -is- still alive? Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.
  12. Totally got me on cool factor, man. My ride's cool, but my ride ain't got rockets. Your wingsuit actually has freaking rockets. Rockets. Damn. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.
  13. The A-II? I was flying it that way to keep it -down- with that canopy. If I had opened it out all the way with the leading edge -not- partially collapsed to keep that thing on a leash, it would have outflown the canopy and I would have had to fly it steeply head-down to get the CG right for a power level like that anyway. The flight regime on display in that image is a controlled half-stall which is how you use a suit that big at the bottom edge of its power curve. I had to fly it dirty to keep it on a leash. To my knowledge there is no suit that can stay with it when it is opened all the way. It occupies a largely-unexplored range between normal wingsuits and canopies. It may be useless for competition so far, but this line of research has resulted in a suit with more sheer annihilating air traction than anything else I ever flew. There are suits that fly faster, suits that fly further, and suits that fly longer. But there are no suits that do what this one does. I do not care if I can win competitions with this thing. Learning to fly it is reward enough. Special thanks to Tony for being willing to build me something -that- far off the map from a bunch of drawings. Suit worked, old man, it worked. The workmanship in that thing is as world-class as it gets, I want to fly nothing else. I owe you one. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.
  14. I'd noted these guys a ways back... if I remember right, at first the stated goal was to apply all sorts of engineering techniques to design a wingsuit with a superior glide meant to win at the next world cup. Their release info included pretty pictures of graphics and simulations. I paid attention briefly but without all that much interest because I was pretty sure I knew the fate of this one before they even got started. I've seen this approach before. It doesn't work. I was wondering how long it was going to take for these guys to figure that out. There've been a few other attempts of a similar nature, usually loaded with as many trendy engineering-school buzzwords and jargon as humanly possible. "We will use the latest in data acquisition technology combined with digital physics simulation and computational fluid dynamics to characterize the lift to drag ratio until we have grepped the succotash to a flux capacitor inhibiting boundary layer detachment leading to a mathematically proven superior suit design." In every case it becomes more about finding ways to apply those jazzy engineering-school tools to the job regardless of whether or not it will be effective. It never is. They invariably produce lots and lots of analysis diagrams and flow charts and mathematical gibberish and whatnot, none of which ever yields a detectable let alone decisive improvement in suit design. We aren't designing an Airbus, here, where all factors except the air itself are rigid and can be characterized and defined and analyzed and the improvements are black and white. The performance of a suit is far more the pilot than it is the suit. When the range of performance can vary by 30-50% depending on exactly how the pilot handles it, a 3% improvement in the aerodynamics of the suit, produced after months of designing data collection hardware, analysis protocols, doing simulations, designing your improvement, building the suit... Doesn't even show. At all. Lost in the noise to insignificance. A slightly better pilot in an inferior suit will beat it repeatedly. Whereas, the direct route... Build a suit. Try it. See how it does. Think about how the suit flies, think up how you'd change it to improve it based on intuitive sense of handling and how far the suit actually flew, then just build another one and try it again... That approach led directly from Birdman Classic 1 to the Tony Suits -Bird series not to mention Squirrel's current dominant offerings. Last I saw they were working on their mathematically proven Athena helmet that was supposed to be the big magic improvement to beat everybody. I think everyone in the project probably graduated before producing anything except a swoopy looking helmet that looks just like other equally swoopy helmets designed without a terabyte of computational fluid dynamics behind them. But, we demonstrated our ability to apply CFD to a physics problem, yay! -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.
  15. Wolf, I very hope you're wrong about that outcome. Unfortunately, you're right, I too see a distinct possibility of the whole thing turning out that way. That's the thing about chaos. You often see abrupt inversions of effects on very large scales. Another one of the many reasons Trump was elected was because the left liberal culture war thing... once very necessary, to push for the rights of women, blacks, gays, succeeded too well. The narrative to the straight white male demographic slowly changed from "Us, too, dammit" to "Not you anymore, not at all, you the evil bad guy now, straight white males root of all evil must be cast down" to the point of colleges mandating indoctrination classes where white people learn about how evil and racist they are just for being white. To the point that I cannot view any form of media for 5 seconds without being hit by -something- jamming race issues in my face and blaming it on white people. The left overshot its goal of being a uniting force and slammed straight into being as divisive as possible, screeching, labeling, silencing and condemning anything not in enthusiastic agreement with its agenda. What we all just saw was pushback. Trump realized he could gain at both ends... feed off all the screeching outrage while laughing at it and even taunting it in blatant public defiance of it and looking like a hero to every poor working class schmoe whose life has been wrecked by the system as it is now, (see that beautiful Michael Moore piece) represented by the same people accustomed to being able to destroy people by calling them racists. Right now is still chaos while we see how emergent forces rebalance themselves. I'd hope to see the culture pull together... the left just got its ass kicked because it spent too much time screeching and playing social justice warrior and not enough time paying attention to actual issues like the former middle class wondering how to feed their kids. This should serve as a lesson that, ok, deadlock's broken, can both sides start trying to fix the stuff Trump got elected on? The current rioting is ominous as fuck, though. The other likely Trump effect which the rioting may be the first signs of, is it took a whole bunch of already cracked social divides and crises that were just barely holding stable, and cracked them wide open all at once. There are a whole bunch of social and economic stresses that were already stretched to a hair shy of the snapping point. Some, far past it, and the only reason they hadn't snapped, was it got that way gradually, frog in a jacuzzi style, or the way you can supercool a bottle of water far past the crystallization point if you do it slowly enough. It's only 21 degrees and still liquid so long as nothing disturbs it... The seething resentment in the black community for one. The anger of working people about things like the obamacare individual mandate for another. "We're barely surviving here and now we're being told we will buy insurance at a thousand a month at gunpoint?" The entire generation that just got enslaved to college debt that didn't buy them anything because the jobs disappeared. Then you thump that bottle. You elect Trump. And a wave of crystallization driven by excessive energy differential passes through that bottle and the entire thing freezes solid in 5 seconds. When that happened in 1989 half the eastern bloc fell apart virtually overnight. In human terms it means large scale violent change that occurs apparently out of nowhere, as large portions of the population get pissed off all at once and try to do something about it. Usually something destructive. If it happens it'll happen fast. Given how far gone this system had to be for Trump to get elected, that violent change may last for some time, too. Question is, is it gonna happen and what's the trigger? Maybe it's already been triggered, or maybe it won't be triggered at all. Maybe the election riots are the beginning of that wave, or maybe they're just a few cracked stresses resolving themselves and will settle to a new equilibrium. Time will tell. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.