lurch

That little green S-biner hack is elegant as fuck. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Gorgeous image. Might I offer a live-action version? Video by the late great Nebelkopf. Pilot: Me. Suit: S-Bird. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sk6Ij-KrvPk -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

If this is in reference to that episode with the slovenian moonshine, that was, uh, an unexplained incident. Still makes my head hurt just thinking about it. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Is there gonna be high altitude? I -like- high altitude...

You know, I'd all but abandoned this website because there was nothing worth looking at happening here anymore.

Concrete Rebound Hammer splashes -before- it hits the water. Do not use Concrete Rebound Hammer to install dental fillings. Concrete Rebound Hammer does not conduct electricity. Concrete Rebound Hammer can be fireproof or noncarcinogenic, but not both at the same time! Concrete Rebound Hammer is void, even where NOT prohibited. Concrete Rebound Hammer will not pollute waterways when used as directed! Concrete Rebound Hammer is not rated for use with endangered species! Do not attempt to refill Concrete Rebound Hammer, dispose of properly when empty. Concrete Rebound Hammer impairs your ability to drive a car and operate heavy machinery, and may cause health problems. Concrete Rebound Hammer is tax deductible! Concrete Rebound Hammer is low in sodium AND gluten free! Concrete Rebound Hammer does not weaken eggshells! Concrete Rebound Hammer is handicapped accessible! When left unattended, Concrete Rebound Hammer may seep a small amount of fluid. This is normal. Concrete Rebound Hammer is Atkins-diet compatible! -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I think you need Concrete Rebound Hammer. It's on this site, a quick search ought to tell you everything you need to know about it. And there is a -lot- to know about it. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

The only thing that still gets on my nerves is when there is an incident that ends up in the news. Time after time after time, ignorant or insensitive people I try not to write up as complete assholes ask me, with an odd enthusiasm to their manner, almost an avidity or excitement as if they enjoy prodding me with it or gain some joy from the question like they think it's awesome that they actually know a guy who might have known the dead guy in the news... "Hey, did you hear about those guys that just died..." as if he thinks maybe I might be totally out of touch and he gets to be the one to tell me about it, with evident enjoyment. I want to, but don't, blow my stack and blast their heads off "YES, THEY WERE MY FRIENDS, I'VE LOST SIX IN THE LAST YEAR ALONE, NOW, -FUCK OFF-!!!!" I'm a little raw about that right now actually because I have a guy at work who asks this every single time a fatality in either skydiving or BASE makes the news, to the point where I KNOW he's going to ask it again today, and he did, about the Yosemite incident. I almost detonated. I don't blow my stack easily, but for guys like him I'm sometimes sorely tempted to make an exception. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Not a bad start to the season, I think. Tag, you're it! -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

The internet is full of catchy images that get passed around and called "Memes". It is something of a reductionist misnomer as the real origin meaning and use of the word "meme" is in regard to the behavior and characteristics of self-replicating self-propagating ideas. They can be simple, (pokemon, Bart Simpson T-shirts) or complex (Roman Catholicism, Islam, Communism, Socialism, Fascism, etc). But the thing they all have in common is that in the wild they behave like the intellectual equivalent to a computer virus. As the upper end of human society grows more sophisticated, connected and well informed more and more people will become aware of the hazards of allowing such self-replicating ideas into their minds. These dangers are real. An out-of-control memetic infection resulted in Nazi Germany. Another resulted in the Rwandan Genocide. These ISIS clowns are infected with the idea equivalent of Rabies. The Zombie Apocalypse is real- we're lookin' at it. The lesson I personally draw from all this is, don't buy into any "ism"s. It's kind of like internet hygiene... don't just download and run any ".exe" files you find, and don't just download and run every "ism" file people are passing around just because it is trendy. The fact that it is trendy, is often a dead giveaway in and of itself that this is probably a meme best avoided. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Observation: I've got a relative who used to make a lot of ignorant noise gloating about the superiority of everything Cali including the gas. (Did not and does not own a vehicle in the state). I lived there for a year and one of the first things I noticed driving my old '83 AMC Eagle with the 4.2 I-6 was the gas mileage dropped off a cliff while I was living in that state. Went from an average around 15-17 mpg to closer to 12 or lower. As soon as I left the state and filled up in Nevada the gas mileage took an abrupt and dramatic jump back to the upper teens, highway. The energy content of the fuel in California was very visibly less. Cali residents are getting screwed coming and going, dutch door action. Prices are jacked and they need more of it. Lovely system they have there. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Rare experience I had about 10 years ago: There is a P3 Orion the navy lost out in the middle of Subic Bay sometime in the late 60's. The navy never found it. My Dad did. When he took me there he said there were maybe 4 people alive who had the GPS coordinates for this thing. He had it so accurate when we hit bottom at 140 feet the anchor line was maybe 5 feet from the wing. I stood on the tail surface gazing up at the tail itself, tripping balls on narcosis even breathing nitrox till I remembered I wasn't really supposed to stand on the bottom. Although standing on the wing of a plane, you aren't likely to get a stingray in the ankle. It takes some concentration to keep it together at that depth. The experience of nitrogen narcosis, to the uninitiated, is -exactly- like a real good nitrous oxide buzz you'd get at the dentist. You're dazed as hell, happy, definitely not thinking straight, but you're ok with it. Just as long as you remember you also happen to be at the bottom of the ocean and remain calm, you're cool. The sight of the tail of that thing looming out of the haze at the bottom will stay with me for the rest of my life. So far as I know my Dad took the secret of its location with him when he died. I've had a few adventures. That was one of the coolest. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Well, I just registered, myself, so all you birdiepeople are gonna have to deal with me and my rampaging around hootin' and howling and flapping and perching and drinking and falling down and flying, AGAIN! Hey, if you aren't gonna live colorfully, why bother? Whoever leaves behind the biggest debris cloud, WINS! Anybody wanna fly?

One thing I've noticed is a universal. Anyone against private ownership of firearms has never had to defend themselves with one. Tell us, Mpohl, have you ever had to deal with civil disturbance? Riots? Violent neighbors in a bad neighborhood? Have you ever had to defend yourself against multiple attackers with a gun? Short story: Loud noise outside. Roommate and I step out to investigate. Walked straight into minor gang war on front doorstep. In this case, hispanic VS hispanic, opposing group attacking my neighbors. Neighbors outnumbered 2 to 1. Attacking group did not wait to see who was who and attacked us instantly the moment we opened the door and stepped out. One guy ran at my roommate and punched him. At that moment a truck backed into our driveway with 8-10 more of the opposing team armed with shovels, chunks of wood, rocks and other junk. Now outnumbered more like 4 to 1, situation out of control in 5 seconds flat. I ducked inside my apartment and came out with a 12-gauge fullsize hunting shotgun. Yelled "HEY!" and racked the slide to load it and get their attention. That was the end of the incident. They ran... scattered like leaves falling over their own asses in a panic to get away. From one man, with a shotgun. One man with a gun can face down ten men without one. One thing... just one thing prevented a bunch of people from getting seriously hurt that night. The presence of a gun. This was not a case of escalation of violence. The violence had already started. They were throwing chunks of concrete at my neighbors and had already tried to punch out my friend on sight. I used the gun, for the reason we have that freedom. To STOP the violence, and stop it right now, before somebody gets hurt. If I had not been free to own that gun, that incident would have ended very badly for all of us. These people meant to seriously fuck up my neighbors or they would not have shown up in large numbers with weapons. I've also seen firsthand, what happens when nobody in the group is armed. Saw this one right in front of me in the street about 5 years later. They waited till the cops left, hunted down the kid they were after, put a knife into the kid's kidney and dumped his body in a ravine. I didn't find out if he lived. But it's ok, he wasn't armed, so nobody got shot! I'd rather take my chances being shot accidentally than the certainty of death or maiming if violence comes to my doorstep. If you'd prefer to throw yourself on the mercy of whatever gang you may encounter, be my guest. I hope you like hospital food. IF they let you live. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Having survived an entire lifetime of fantastic adventures completely unscathed... cliff jumps, skydiving, human ballistic stunts, never once broke a bone. Possible broken tailbone once but never Xrayed to confirm. Walked it off. Get out of work one early morning, exhausted. Old american AMC Eagle, 2 door hatch, big, heavy, long doors weigh about a half ton each. Swinging the door shut, slipped in the mud. Hand slipped off edge of door and slapped against edge of doorframe half a second before the door closed. Caught the end of my forefinger. Made the mistake of reacting to it by yanking my hand back. Looked at what was left of the fingertip. The nail was ripped out by the root and flipped back over the finger, still firmly attached at the nailbed. Till then I never knew the fingernail actually goes all the way back to the knuckle. All the nail revealed was bone-white and the rest of the burst fingertip was so much ground meat. Doorframe had crushed the fingertip down to the size of the door gap, about 1/8 inch. Went inside, couldn't bring myself to rip the nail off the nailbed, rinsed it off, wrapped the mess in a paper towel and some duct tape and went to sleep, too exhausted to deal with it. Woke up, still bleeding, realized this needed a doctor. Turns out it also snapped the end off the fingerbone. They cut what was left of the nail off, stitched and wrapped it. Took about a year but the nail eventually did grow back. A lifetime's perfect record of no bones broken ruined by mud and a car door. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

When I was 18 I had a neighbor with the legendary T/A 6.6. Let me drive it once in winter. The car was unfortunately almost totally helpless in 3/4 of an inch of snow. I could back that thundering beast out of the parking spot... drop it in Drive, and as soon as I took my foot off the brake it would begin to orbit it's own nose and spin in circles on the front tires. Took me ages to get it to go in a straight line. On the highway though, man that thing was fun. Big, heavy old-school American iron. What's funny is, those cars weren't nearly as fast as we remembered them. Not knowing any better at the time, I thought that thing was the fastest thing I'd ever driven. All that roar and thunder. And granted, it -was- the fastest thing available at the time... in the mid-70's when automakers, strangled by new emissions laws, were trying to convince the american public that a 145 HP 305 smallblock was an acceptable substitute for the 440 HP big block muscle cars they grew up with in the 60's. A few years back I yanked the old 4.0 I-6 block out of my jeep and dropped in a 4.6 I-6 stroker built as a musclecar block. Bored stroked ported compression jacked, lumpy cam, 24 lb injectors and more, good to just under 300 HP and 320 ft lb, in an otherwise stock Grand Cherokee. Fun truck. Can rip all four tires loose on a wet road in 4wd. Runs quietly, no mods to exhaust, only giveaway is a very throaty rumble from the cam. I was surprised when, in my mid-30's I looked up that T/A 6.6 and found out it was only packing about 220 HP. My 6 cylinder jeep is actually way faster than that car. It just doesn't feel like it because there's no drama when you step on it. No thud and thunder, no big-V-8 sound, no heavy burbling sound at idle, it just goes. The thing about the 6.6 is it's all about character. Our modern cars are faster, but they're definitely missing something. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Invalid argument. Consider the scaling of time involved. If I had to guess I'd say the actual time clock for system development followed by enough time for a planet to settle down and life arise on it is more or less set by the time the star is forming and lights off. Not all stars light off at the same time. Those suckers have been coming and going in waves of star formation for many generations. The galaxies they can see way out there are visibly younger and simpler than the nearby "modern" ones- since the ones we can see 13 billion light years out, we are seeing as they were 13 billion years ago. The image of what they look like now, won't reach us for 13 billion years. Nothing says variations of life haven't been arising, scattered across the galaxies for hundreds of millions to billions of years. Given the number of stars out there, I'd say it is likely there are billions upon billions of planets bearing life at all levels of evolution from single cell (or even forms of life that don't involve a cell structure- that may just be our little local tweak for all we know) through the local analogue to dinos, to uncounted variations on sentient species from prehuman to far past human levels. I'd bet on graveyard planets where something like us arose, and, cursed by the same aggression and intelligence that led to dominance of the planet, nuked themselves into glass before they could ever get out of the system. When you have a trillion trillion trillion stars to work with, the most improbable things imaginable actually become certain to happen as long as we know they aren't entirely impossible, and since we exist, we know we're possible, ergo, we are everywhere! "We" defined as intelligent life. Billion to one odds? Hell, that means that shit happens billions of times a day, out there somewhere. Trillion to one odds? There's a galaxy out there with an estimated 9 trillion stars in it. Therefore if the odds of a species identical to ours were one in a trillion, odds are there are NINE species like us in that one galaxy ALONE! There are an estimated 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe. That's just the part we can see. Given isotropism of galactic distribution, the fact that on a big enough scale the spread of galaxies all looks the same, there's no reason to think the large scale structures change just out of sight- so unless there's a massive bend in physics laws that only kicks in in a sphere 15 billion LY away from here centered on this planet just out of view, (sarcasm) we know the universe looks like this at any range further than Observable Universe. You go 500 billion lightyears from here and shit still looks the same- trillions of galaxies as far as the hubble can see. If we ever invented a tachyon-based observation method involving detection of galactic emissions at 2x the speed of light, the "observable Universe" would extend out from 14 to a sphere 28 billion lightyears in radius. At which point just the observable part of the universe would be up to the megatrillions of galaxies. Want a more optimistic view? I'd also bet on perhaps local communities in the more dense star systems, binaries... if life arose in a place where you had more than one star nearby, say, orbit of Pluto, hell, even twice that, interstellar travel becomes possible- at least for the locals. If we detected a species around a star only twice the distance to Pluto away from here, we'd have a high speed rail system to that star system by this time next week. First thing we'd do, of course, is try to kill them, second would be see if they were good to eat. If they were better armed, they might be able to make us back off and behave ourselves. If we were fortunate and they turned out to be more civilized, and did not annihilate us in return, which is what we'd do, we'd eventually see trade. We didn't have to turn out this vicious, and maybe in a few thousand more years of evolving toward civilization we won't be. Maybe sometime we'll even be safe to set loose out there. It's self limiting- we sure as hell will never get out of the system while we collectively spend 10 trillion a year on military killing each other and a few tens of billions developing space gear and figuring a way out of the box. I.E. a way to leave the solar system. I think it entirely possible, in fact extremely probable, that there are more species than we can count out there, living much better lives than we are. Their radiative emissions either are discreet, nonexistent or unnecessary, or haven't reached us yet, their civilizations being 60 billion lightyears from here, or we simply haven't come up with a way to detect them yet. I'd bet on that last. Only just recently did we gain the ability to detect planets. At first they only found one, then two, now there's a catalogue of thousands, and now we know planets are as common as dirt out there. When I was a kid, they didn't actually know if there were planets around any other stars but our own. They couldn't say for sure if planets were just a quirk of our solar system or what. Now they know. More recently they were able to indirectly identify the color of a planet- some blue thing 200 times the size of earth orbiting its star closer than Mercury. Story is the physics indicated a surface of mostly molten glass, basically. Here's the advance I'm hoping for. I think if they keep working at it, and eventually can easily work out the color of planets they identify, the one I'm waiting for is a very specific return saturated in the 500-600 nm range- the color of chlorophyll. To my knowledge there is only one natural process that could turn a planet that particular color of green- Life. The day we find a green planet is the day we know for certain there is life out there, and relatively nearby. If I had to bet, I'd bet that we are in fact saturated with their signals all the time, we just haven't figured out what they are and don't know to look for them that way yet. There's probably a simple, obvious way to make a signal stand out, a way we haven't thought of yet, and much like discovering planets were everywhere all along, we'll find we've been rolling in reruns of I Love Lucy from thousands of species for millennia but it took that long to figure out what that signal would actually look like when it got here and build something designed to detect it. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

To this day the cognitive dissonance is one of the most darkly hilarious things about religion, to me. Over and over, these endless, mindless assertions. "God does this" "God says this" "God wants that". All from a book, a compilation of ancient writings by mostly illiterate bronze age galilean sheepherders who knew -nothing-. They did not know of the solar system, the planets, they did not know they were ON a planet, they did not know what planets WERE. They did not know of cells, mechanisms of life, DNA, bacteria, viruses... Knew nothing of chemistry, medicine, geology... tectonics, molecules, atoms, subatomics, astronomy... electricity, gravity, orbital dynamics... they did not know what an orbit was. The average first-world 8-year old child knows far more about the universe than those people ever did. All they had were invented explanations, myths, stories, made-up crap that is charming and cute when a child does it. But when a supposedly rational adult makes the same assertions in the face of modern knowledge they come off as witless. When people make assertions of knowledge about God I tend to feel the same condescending exasperation a doctor must feel when diagnosing a patient with a bacterial infection and prescribing an antibiotic... Only to have the patient say "No no you silly man that's not it at all, I made the mistake of camping on a ley line which disturbed my energy because venus was in orion last night. I've been having trouble opening my chakras to expel the negative vibrations I picked up, but you'll see, I'll offer some burning sage to the four corners which will clear my chakras and harmonize my energy." The doctor looks blankly at the idiot and wonders if it is worth the aggravation to inform the patient that they are speaking pure gibberish. To anyone who thinks anything from any ancient scripture has ANY resemblance to reality... to anyone who claims they know what god wants or says or thinks... Science has given us the most stunningly effective "Shut the fuck up" rebuttal ever available, and it can be expressed in just four words. Hubble Extreme Deep Field. The closest we will ever come to actually -knowing- what is -really- out there. Because for the first time in human history we can SEE it. Something like .00001% of the night sky. And in it, 10,000 galaxies' worth of cold, hard, fact. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_eXtreme_Deep_Field#mediaviewer/File:Hubble_Extreme_Deep_Field_%28full_resolution%29.png THAT, is what infinity actually LOOKS like. More stars, than the entire human species has brain cells. I love looking at that image and trying to comprehend the implications. Because I can't. It's the greatest mindfuck in all history. Where religious types would fall on their knees in mindless worship and reduce it all to the simplistic human notion of "god" in an effort to try to think they have a handle on it, I just look, and enjoy the limitless sense of sheer AWE that comes with understanding that it IS too much to understand. We do not and cannot know, anything... about whatever may have started it all behind the scenes. All we find is complexity of rules energy and matter going beyond all scales we can create. We can see about 14 billion light years. As near as we can tell, that's just the barrier to sensing due to the fact that the lightspeed limit means no information from further away than that has had time to even reach this part of the universe yet. As near as we can tell, that beautiful mess of galaxies as numerous as atoms, just goes on... forever. The only true and intelligent answer to almost all of these questions to which people answer "god" is "I don't know." Is that simple humility really THAT hard? -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I can see where this is going... 200 years from now the cops will be using spread-spectrum rapid-cycling pulse lasers that go from IR to UV 300 times per second to drill through any color armor, the gangsters will be using extended-spectrum polymerized sapphire first-surface mirror armor to defeat it, and the cops will be trying to ban it... -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Meh. This is one of those clickbait fakeouts. They say straight-up that this is planted into the news cycle specifically to drum up investment/enthusiasm for Lockheed. I can't get excited about it because there aren't any actual facts in any of it. As much as I'm a huge fan of fusion and can't wait to see the real thing in play, this non-article has been all over the news today. "Lockheed makes huge fusion breakthrough" as if they finally achieved a solid break-even, something more than a lab fixture or tech demo and can now go build that commercial fusion plant we've all been waiting for for decades. But then the details, or lack of them, start to show. No actual reactor yet, not even a name. No mention of the process, what reaction, cost, technology... In fact once you pick through and process all the hype in the articles, they say almost nothing. There are dozens of articles floating around today and they all say... nothing! Nothing new at any rate, nothing they haven't been saying about it already for decades. Just under the hype there's nothing but weasel-words and carefully chosen phrasing. "Could" "Would" "Might"... How are they dealing with plasma instability? Last I heard they still had issues with compression asymmetries with the laser version and eddy current field breakdown with magnetic confinement. Reactor wall ablation? Is this a steady state reaction or something cruder, hohlraum pulse-fusion, we talking firing little nuggets into the center of a reaction chamber and hitting it with a laser, or did they figure out a working mini-tokamak runs continuously like a neon light, steadily cranking out more heat than the power it takes to drive it? Is this superconductor based or did they figure out how to pull it off with ordinary electromagnets? For decades the idea has been to try to pull it off on a giant utility scale, large plant. To suddenly claim they can jump directly to working miniaturized deployable generator plant you can fit on a truck skips far too much detail. I had high hopes for the Polywell concept but there's no mention of that, either, although if I had to guess I'd say that might be what they refer to here. Even then, no mention of how they plan to collect and harness the energy, either, let alone redirect some of it to keep the thing running self-sufficiently. The final blow to this hype for me is the one note of actual reality they reference where they still admit the damn thing is a decade away. They say they could have a demo running in a year. Tall order. Show me one actually running and producing power- nevermind the "finished, truck-mounted power pack consumer product", show me an actual tech demo running on its own, far enough past break-even to actually work even if it is just in a lab driving a 1-megawatt utility electrical load instead of "consumes 50MW and dumps the heat instead of driving an actual load because nobody could bother to rig the heat exchanger and steam turbine" and I'll be impressed. Aside from getting and keeping a past-unity break-even reaction going, collecting and applying the energy is a nontrivial detail. Losses? Thermal gradients? Materials? Maintenance? I don't even ask for a developed application. Don't care if they haven't compacted it down to a truck yet or made it convenient and easy to use so long as you read the fucking manual. Just show me a demo plant consuming a few megawatts but cranking out 100 and I don't mean thermal and theoretical, I mean actual electrical power exceeding input. I'll buy this with enthusiasm when I see them power one up, get it running, then cut the utility power and the thing powers itself and runs even a single building on the leftover electricity. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

YES!!! YOU, Have WON, the INTERNETS! It is clear: 11 out of 10 dentists are well aware of the self-defense applications of Concrete Rebound Hammer! *sits down, munches popcorn and watches the sun for the splash when the ooze, wrapped in gun-foil, hits the surface* Any minute, now. *munch munch...* -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Note: When I first tried the "way, way, WAY beyond Apache-scale" Albatross Project suit it was immediately evident a 10-foot 28" F-111 was not going to work. Anticipating this, but wanting to see HOW badly it didn't work, I tried it, initiating deployment at about 6,600 feet. It was a 1,200 foot fight to get a canopy out. I had to take the thing head-down to break the burble lock. Once established, that burble lock kept the PC trapped on my tail even after I folded in a ball. The old "kick the PC out of the burble" trick I briefly used with an Apache/8.5 foot/28" combo did not work on a suit of this scale. I was simply batting the thing around in the burble with my heels. The suit was so damn huge even folded in a ball the resulting burble kept the PC thoroughly stuck in the center till I went headdown and erased the entire burble combined with reaccelerating toward terminal. Not an experiment for the timid. I got back to Tony and reported the results and what I thought I needed. Major props to Tony for his support of the project, he dashed off to the shop and built me a 34" ZP 12-footer with BASE mesh for that extra bit of traction. The handle is also apparently a BASE thing... a small, hollow plastic ball with a bunch of holes in it, laced down to the PC at 4 points. Effectively impossible to wrap or knot the bridle around it. After deployment during packjobs I find that ball deeply embedded in the center, sucked up against the end of the bridle by the kill line. It has worked well since jump 1, with zero issues related to knotting or tangling regardless of fallrate. I -can- still undeploy the entire thing by pitching at the suit's default cruise... If I simply fold and throw with no acceleration lead-in it will suck the whole thing back and leave me with a pile of bridle sitting on my tail and the PC milling around in the mess. Perfect setup for a knotted or choked off PC. But all I have to do is fold up in a ball and drop. PC comes off clean, no knots. Some of my lack-of-knot may be a result of having evolved a procedure where I drop awhile before throwing, thus avoiding or at least minimizing exposure to the problem of the PC stirring around mixed up with the bridle. However I've spent enough time playing around with the edges of this that if it was gonna tie in a knot easily it would have done so by now. I've also had Larry Chernis build me a PC variety-pack for future upgrades, a 36, 38, and a 40 inch with normal mesh and PVC pipe handles- stuffed with foam, extra-wide binding tape through the tube nailed down at both ends. I haven't used these yet- they're in reserve for when I'm going to need them for the A-II 2nd-Gen Albatross which is currently on the drawing board. Bridles longer than 10 feet -can- be used reliably, you just have to pay extra attention to the handle construction details. Larry built me exactly what I asked for in handle details and I'm looking forward to finding out how well the PVC handle works with this. I don't expect to be using these till the next suit in the series is built. When I do I'll post the results here somewhere. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

That short story was fun to read. First I'm laughing, thinking, "A christmas tree. They jumped, a christmas tree. WHY!?!

It depends on what suit is being flown and what deplyment gear config. I can get away with a full-flight deploy in an S-bird, but not a Rebel 2. I've spent much of the last season experimenting with a proto loosely based on the Rebel 2 I call the Albatross Project with about another 5 sq.ft *(rough estimate) tacked on in selected areas and some modifications to available body positions. The result was a suit so slow I have to deliberately speed up in 2 axes at once to get a clean deployment and that, if flared before opening, can undeploy a 12-foot bridle and a 34 inch PC. The suit was designed to analyze braking maneuvers, and the closer you get to a true all-stop the harder it gets to do anything effectively such as plant a canopy with what little airspeed you've got. The Rebel 2 can undeploy a 34 as well but is a good deal more forgiving which I expect is why the Rebel 2 is on the market and the Albatross is not. The Albatross is rewarding to fly but the most merciless thing I've ever flown when it comes to sloppy deployment technique. My original config was a 10-foot bridle, 28" PC and I fought for 1200 feet to get a canopy out past the thing. It is technically very tricky to use effectively but with all the wing engaged in a heavy deceleration maneuver the thing throws a shockwave in front of it so badly it renders barometric Alti-track data useless. The only way to get a clean canopy past a suit of this scale is to drop the nose, speed up, then fold the wings and plummet for a good 2-3 seconds, throw, and get really small again really fast before it can suck the PC back behind me. The smaller the suit and the faster you're going the more creativity you can get away with in deployment technique. Damn near anything works fine on an old first-gen Birdman GTI. Everything from Ghosts to Vampires and S-6's through Raptors, R-Birds and Colugos fit somewhere in the spectrum in between. On an Apache, Aura, Venom or Rebel 2 scale suit, airspeed maintenance starts becoming very important especially for lightweight slow-falling people. Heavier pilots can get away with a lot more without noticeable negative effects on deployment characteristics. They simply default to higher airspeeds much sooner at every stage of every maneuver. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.