lurch

Alright, could somebody put up some images of what you actually see with them on? I can't say I was all -that- interested, I learned to fly by feel not by gauges, and so far with reports of signal acquisition issues and the zeroing apparently hidden somewhere it sounds more like the Garmin Etrex I picked up a ways back- technically it can do the job but practically it did it poorly and was more hassle to use than it was worth. Damn Garmin ate batteries like popcorn and killed its batteries whether it was on or off, only way to make sure it worked next use was to pull the damn batteries out. If its just a simple fixed "digital watch" style LCD display I think I'll pass. Anyway I'd like to know what it does in some serious detail before I'll splash another 300$ on another gadget that turns out to be useless. If its all that and a bag of chips though, maybe I'd get one myself to fine tune for comp training. And, I'd REALLY like to see ability to set waypoints, and a little arrow pointing to the DZ... good for cloud surfs! If it can do THAT, I'd DEFINITELY want one. I've got lost a time or two up there... -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Bare minimum, need to know, have you flown a suit at all, yet? If so, how many flights and in what suit? Gotta tell ya, your weight and build are damn near perfect for it. I'm 5' 10" 135 lb myself. If you really take the time to learn it well, you'll be able to catch any flock, in any suit. I had a 9 year 2000+ jump progression to work my way up to the huge flying mattress suits and the thing that will eventually allow you to catch anything in the sky will be if you spend long enough learning to use small to medium suits to their limits. A rough recommendation would be to start with either a Tony T-bird (best conservative choice but limited potential) or R-bird, (kind of like a downsize from 170 to 135 skipping the 150... has much more potential but higher risk at first, and forget the S-bird for now, its the lightest of the heavy suits and NOT for beginners) or if you like the look and feel of Phoenix-fly's gear better, you can't go wrong with a Phantom. Its probably the best Light General-Purpose suit out there, good for beginners, but has enough serious potential to keep you learning and satisfied for years. A good progression might be to start with a Phantom, master it, then step up to an S-Bird in a couple years which is good enough to last your career. The X class suits, guys our size will never need unless we're competing or cultivating a deep addiction to ultimate distance and maximum possible time aloft. I've got one, but flying it with others requires bizarre technique and its inappropriate... like using a Formula car for your daily commute to the office. Not what the suit is for. If you wanted a Tony suit progression I'd say borrow a T-bird for 50-100 jumps (you'll likely reach its limits quickly) then get an R as your personal suit and fly that for 2-3 years. Then if you want more but don't want to get too radical and you want a suit you can use for everything, heavy hitter you can still fly with others get an S. If you're satisfied with the R for flocks but you want to go to the ultimate limits for cloud surfs, solos or competing, thats what the X-class suits are good for but you need mega experience to use it. Nearly impossible to fly with others unless they all have megasuits, but it will get you well over 4 minutes flight time with ease. Another sensible choice would be to start with an older used Birdman suit, can be found everywhere cheap, consider it a disposable starter suit to build enough skill for an R. Either way, the R or Phantom will be all the suit you need for years to come. Intrudair Piranha is also an excellent light suit, again somewhat limited but great to learn on, good for acro, and although its a bit of a challenge to catch distant fast moving flocks with it, it can do it, and when you can do that with it, it means you really know what you're doing with it. I tried one last season and I recommend em highly. You'll get far more respect by flying the smaller suits badass than you will going to the big suits too early. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Impressive. Aggressive downsizing, Working his risers like an ape, Can't fly straight or plan a predictable approach to save his life, Pays no attention to obstacles such as other canopies or people on the ground, boxing himself into a corner where sooner or later he'll either be forced to turn into the ground or hit someone, cuts people off, flies erratically through the pattern, Can't keep the damn thing from popping up and dumping him on his ass, does not understand the art of a decent flare yet, Hasn't yet mastered standing up his landings, And he's "learning to swoop". He's only trying to fly about 700 jumps beyond his skill level, what could possibly go wrong? This ought to be good. Anybody want to bet on a femur inside of 2 years? Although judging by the way he sets down it'll be one or both wrists, first. (gets the popcorn going) -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Some thoughts on safety and self policing for the upcoming season: Hi. Lurch here. I never thought I'd be much for public service messages, but the wingsuit community has sort of let its guard down lately, judging by recent events, and I've been contacted by a few other birds and asked what my thoughts were about it. A quick review: I might have some details wrong but here's the gist of it- 2 fatal-Australia and Washington State. 2 AAD fires, Sebastian. 2 water landings, Sebastian- Neither bird had water training or navigation training and both were under 10 WS jumps... what the heck were they doing out over the ocean? 2 2-outs. (Lodi/Byron)... Poorly rigged Apaches, got Apaches banned at Lodi A couple loads landing out, one bird ended up in a tree. At least one bird reportedly doing rodeos at under 15 ws jumps... (With what skills? I hate to be a dick here but at 15 jumps, how is the bird going to know how to recover or control instability, navigate, cope with the jacked up fallrate, or have any sort of Plan B? They won't. A Rodeo is a highly challenging and very complex skydive, a little judgement on display wouldn't hurt here.) A Rodeo, with a costume involved, being launched from 3500 feet. (Facepalm.) One bird being taught to fly a huge suit some 70 jumps lower than Robi's recommendations for Phoenix-fly suits, And Spot tells me of at least 3 birds he's run into who were given First Flight Courses at under 100 jumps. What the hell? I thought we quit that after Dan's incident. So far I haven't heard anybody say much about all this except Chuck Blue and DSE. Chuck's comment appeared to be ignored and as usual Spot gets attacked for speaking up or being an alarmist. But they're right. We're supposed to be self-policing. I don't know what the heck is going on lately but whatever it is, it isn't THAT. I'm not going to throw stones or play "holier than thou" about it. I've done more than my fair share of silly stuff up there myself, badly thought out poor judgement calls, landed out, you name it. The enthusiasm of the moment grabs you, next thing you know everything's gone weird the flock is scattered everywhichway and you're punching a hole at low altitude dodging canopies to land in some field somewhere. Hell, a few years back I let my guard down, pulled a stupid jack move approaching a flock and scared Scotty Burns bad enough that he flew up to me and started chewing me out for it, tearing me a new asshole, in flight, with a lot of english, while we were still at like 9,000 feet. I couldn't exactly hear what he was saying and didn't really need to. The content was pretty clear: "Lurch you crazy Fxxker watch what the F you're doing you almost killed me..." Being bitched out by Scotty B in midflight was quite the experience. I bloody well earned it. "Sorry about that, man" doesn't really help. I spent the rest of the skydive feeling like a complete idiot. On review of the video later I felt like even more of an idiot because yeah I definitely screwed up, having pulled an extremely unpredictable high energy arrival and braking maneuver WAY too close. From his blind side, above and behind. What the hell was I thinking. 900 MPH from 10 feet away. Not my brightest moment up there. And I had about a zillion jumps already and I knew what I was doing. I took the lesson to heart and never repeated the error, (Scotty, thanks for forgiving me for that one bro) but the error was made and it was mine. What I'm saying is experienced birds are not immune to airborne stupidity. Sometimes our better judgement takes a day off. Or we miss something. Flying with an experienced bird doesn't absolve new birds from responsibility for their own judgement and safety, either. If you're a jumper with 98 jumps and some experienced bird is offering to teach you to fly a suit here and now, that bird is being reckless and irresponsible and has no business teaching and the only person who can save you from imminent life threatening stupidity is YOU. We settled on 200 jump minimum years ago for a damn good reason. If you don't know that reason, look it up. Its enlightening. If you're about to get into wingsuiting, have you done your homework and read up thoroughly on it, or are you just planning to start from zero and fly the same day? Might want to step back and take another look at what you're about to get into. We make it look simple and easy. Its not. I'm not saying its a good idea to challenge or second-guess everything you see the veteran birds doing, but if you think you see a safety hazard or a detail we might have missed, ASK. The more well-informed you are the better the decisions you can make. If you think maybe this isn't such a good idea, ASK. You might be right. If it becomes obvious the guy leading the thing hasn't thought it through, ASK! Maybe he did, and its just a detail you didn't know about, maybe he didn't, and will thank you for bringing it up. I've changed plans on dives I was leading before, because of the uncertainties expressed by a newer bird that I hadn't thought of myself. If you have doubts, speak them. I'll listen, as will any senior bird who knows what they're doing. Anyway my point is, it'd be nice to get through a season without any serious incidents in our community. I think we've started showing some improvements, for instance its been awhile since our last tailstrike. I think the decentralized community awareness campaign thats been underway since last season has had a lot to do with that. If we can successfully keep awareness high, it may BE our last tailstrike. But we need to pay attention to more than just tails... navigation. Canopy pattern. Breakoff discipline and separation. Pull altitudes. Complex jumps and more. It can't be just one or two "Safety Nazis" keping an eye out for trouble... and that label itself communicates a certain contempt for caution thats a really, really bad idea. With more birds every year, we need the Safety Nazis more than ever, and if this little speech makes me a Safety Nazi, well, go ahead and call me one. Never let your guard down. Watch out for the other birds around ya. Plan ahead. Think it through. If you think you see me or anyone else about to do something stupid, say so. Your vigilance might save one of us from making a mistake we'd regret. Nuff said. Thanks for listening. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Damn, man. "group of average sized guys wanting to kick the big guys ass and was only able to drop one before the other 4 got me down, and you know what happens next. " *Shudders a bit* Yeah. Yeah I do. The way nobody who hasn't been there can ever understand. Glad you made it through it. Alone against numbers, worst place to be... when they get you down, its over... You notice, it doesn't matter, you can be as inoffensive as you can, doesn't spare you. Its being Different that makes you a target. Lot of other guys my size (140 lb range) assume you big guys got nothing to worry about when in fact you end up targeted frequently for the same reasons- you're an outlier, you're just Different, and the wannabe machos come after you because they wanna look hard, show off how badass they are. By ganging up on isolated individuals that don't have a gang of their own. The good news is, the experience winds up written all over you. You don't need to project it, show off with flashy decoration and a lot of tough guy noise. And the next guy thats eyeing you thinking he can take you if he and his buddies can get you alone by the railroad tracks thinks twice and chooses weaker prey. Good luck out there man, watch your back, check the corners, protect your loved ones, never sit with your back to a door.

Wow. That was an impressive piece of reading. Very, very eerie... The parallells to mass human social behavior are more than striking. Rwanda, for example. From what I've read, they'd been in the midst of quite the high density population boom when they experienced zombie apocalypse and killed off 750,000 people in a few weeks. Societies flip out. Often. Constantly, some place in the world. Some seem to tolerate crowding better than others, the Japanese for instance seem to do ok and maintain order well, but there WAS that little outburst we call world war 2. Not to mention all the belligerent behavior that led up to it dating from as soon as they had ships that could go anywhere worth invading. Japanese society, evolving corked up and isolated for a few thousand years was a case study in "how to design one hell of a warrior society" And when they got loose off their islands, look out, world, cause they were kicking everyone's ass for awhile until they went up against something even bigger. If an orderly, technologically advanced civilization were ever to arise on its own out of Africa the rest of the planet is gonna be TOAST. Nobody has practiced true mass violence on a scale of hundreds of thousands within the US borders since the Euros took on the Indians. Our skills are stale. Go visit the Congo, or Sudan. Theirs are not. The individuals participating in these phenomena do not appear to be aware that that is what they are doing... being a part of an outbreak of certain patterns of behavior- nevertheless the patterns are visible. Emergent group behavior is what it is. Everyone has a different threshold of what they can tolerate how they can adapt and at what point they would begin manifesting said behavior. Like frost on a windshield, it starts at random spots where the conditions to provoke it coincide, and it spreads, as the threshold conditions spread. Eventually becoming areawide. "With more and more peers to defend against, males found it difficult and stressful to defend their territory, so they abandoned the activity. Normal social discourse within the mouse community broke down, and with it the ability of mice to form social bonds. The failures and dropouts congregated in large groups in the middle of the enclosure, their listless withdrawal occasionally interrupted by spasms and waves of pointless violence." Columbine. Virginia Tech. Sandy Hook. The occasional Chinese slasher outbreaks. Neverending African bush wars. Etc. As fucked up as it is, I think its a basic survival mechanism. If we ever evolved a truly nonaggressive, -truly- civilized, healthy society, all the other sick, fucked up psychotic societies would kill it off in a hurry. Really, it'd never be allowed to evolve at all, would it? To this day, the first thing every major human social unit does, as soon as it becomes strong enough, is to attack the one next to it. Tell me I'm wrong. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

"The average person does not need a weapon of any kind in their lives. Really, they don't." Wow. This may be the most bullshit statement I have ever seen in this forum. Lets see: My own personal experience: Age 13: Was a smart, scrawny, underweight little know-it-all that never knew when to shut up, tended to attract bullies like flies. Targeted by group, surrounded, unarmed. Result: Was savagely beaten, stomped, repeatedly kicked in the head face and crotch, left to bleed in the dirt. Age 13, again: Targetted by group of 4 on bicycles. I was on foot, was followed home and attacked on front lawn. Grabbed a nearby political sign as improvised defensive weapon. It enraged them, some kept me busy while others fetched weapons..."Go get your axe handle!" With nowhere left to run, I engaged them, took a few hits, used political sign to disarm one, took his axe handle away from him and used it on him. Fought my way free, took shelter in the house. They got more weapons and began trying to smash their way into the house. I defended the doorway with an enormous butcher knife, stalemate against thrown rocks until police arrived and ended it. Age 14: Still smart, still scrawny, still attracting attention from the jocks and other scum. Had begun carrying knives. Cornered behind a house by group. Pulled a knife and bared my teeth and began hacking at the first one that thought I was bluffing and got in range. Did not need to actually cut him. They freaked and ran. Age 17: Living in Philippines. Targetted for robbery at bus station, 2-on-one while burdened with more luggage than I could easily move. Displayed weapon. Aggressors kept distance. Aggressors continued trying to maneuver to get at my luggage until the bus actually started moving at which point they gave me the finger with both fists, faces twisted in frustrated rage. I blew them a kiss. Age 19: Living in low-end housing, Concord, NH. My neighbor (a "hispanic gank-sta type" ) had tried to "prank" me by attempting to kick me into a laundry room filled with pepper gas. His idea of "fun", Gas The Gringo. I had known something wasn't right, when he made his move, (kicked me in the back) I was ready, grabbed the doorframe, flipped back, slammed him into a wall and told him off, then left. Neighbor decided this means I had "dissed" him, kicked in my door late that evening and tried to strangle me in my sleep, macing me first. Fought him blind, (had a grip on his shirt so I knew exactly where he was) and would have slain him but when he discovered that gassing me did not render me helpless he broke free and ran. Slept with blades close at hand ever since. Age 20: Local gang fight in front yard, attacked the moment my roommate and I stepped out front door to investigate. Produced massive shotgun. Gang ran away. Age 22: Rancho Cordova, California: Again living in next-to-ghetto housing. White man living in an almost all-black neighborghood. Random crackhead (bulging eyes, puffing and blowing, trembling, sweating profusely, huge muscles, outweighed me by 100 lb) had been terrorizing parking lot for 2 days, attacked me on sight. Had to jump a 6 foot spike topped wrought iron fence to do so. I backed away... when he got within 15 feet I produced the 18 inch imitation Samurai sword I kept handy, and drew it. Crackhead froze. I told him to go away. He did. The next time he saw me when he pulled in, he panicked at the sight of me, jumped back in his car and fled. Now thats more like it. Age 22: Rancho again. Bought a cheap K-mart mountain bike. Hadn't owned it 48 hours before one of the locals decided to jump me for it. I chose escape over weapon since I was already getting on the bike when he charged me. Guy fell on his face from the leap he made trying to take me off the bike. I was quicker. Once rolling he gave chase, trying to cut me off from parking lot exit till I produced an Asp baton. Around corner, saw whole ghetto family poking heads around corner of house to see if Deshawn Gankstaballa had succeeded in bagging today's prey. When they saw I had a weapon they vanished. Age 28: Attacked in traffic by road-rager. When rager attempted to open my vehicle I pulled a knife and showed it to him, told him I'd use it, colorfully. He got back in his car like a good little boy and behaved himself. I've led a more interesting life than average, but I know one thing: We, are monkeys, and fundamentally the behavior of our species, absent the restraint of weapons, is no better than the Gombe chimpanzee groups documented by Jane Goodall in the 70's which occasionally tried to wipe each other out...and occasionally succeeded. Violence is in our nature, and anyone who ventures outside Leave-it-to-beaver polite white suburbia will find that out. We are an incredibly violent species. You are either armed, or you are a victim. When the shit hits the fan there is no middle ground. To this day I have never hurt anyone except a couple of arms I broke when jumped for my bike in 5th grade. There were only two of them so I rather absently broke their arms and left, no weapons required that time. Just because -I- believe in nonviolence doesn't mean THEY do. You're either prepared, or helpless. Choose. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Jedi. Jedi don't have or need gods. They work for the light side of the force. Starting from that assumption, an entire moral code can be derived with a basis on respect, understanding and empathy for others, and a rejection of principles that tend to have negative consequences such as hate, fear, greed, and lust for power. Its amazing that a moral code derived from a fictional space opera with a tongue in cheek humor makes more sense than any existing religion I'm aware of. So, yeah. I work for the light side of the force, my only real goal in life is to be "A good man", and I try my damndest to get through life without making it worse for or causing harm to anyone else. Call me a Jedi. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Not really, but then when I plan on flying near rain I do so in full tactical body armor both to fend off the sharp raindrops and just in case the Homeland Security assholes open up on me with ground-based 7.62 turrets. They've been a bit antsy lately, having nearly shot down a glider recently because the guy didn't obey commands to land fast enough. Its a rough sky out there... to be prepared, search the internet for the famous "Mall Ninja"... read and learn... The same tactical approach the Mall Ninja brings to bear against hostiles targetting Macy's works against aggressive weather phenomena. Give it a shot, you'll see... -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Thanks, Robin.

I'd say cold. And probably wet. You also must know to be careful flying in freezing rain conditions. The pointy ends of the raindrops become basically tiny upside down icicles, and since you're falling through them they can shred your suit not to mention cause profuse bleeding. Worse, your flightpath overhead may be responsible for triggering the dreaded "random sky shredder" syndrome produced spontaneously by cold clouds which has been causing random fatalities among pedestrians and occasional housepets for centuries. When you fly through a freezing raincloud you disturb the airmass, tumbling the frozen drop shapes, which, once destabilized, tend to fall point-down, resulting in a uniquely hazardous form of diffuse sharp hail falling over anywhere you flew in which the conditions exist to produce it. This is why we have cloud clearance rules that we never ever break. We do not want to be responsible for induction of inadvertently aggressive weather phenomena, its difficult to insure for, and whenever there is a "random sky shredder" fatality there is an investigation. If there were any wingsuits operating in the vicinity there are often some very hard questions and a great deal of FAA scrutiny for a long time to come. Be safe- avoid freezing clouds. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Trae. He's right. I did it. It had plenty of leverage. Leverage wasn't the problem. Problem was overall loading. There's no amount of leverage that will allow a human body to control more than a fraction of its own weight, held at arms' length (or legs' length.) in a 3d environment where the load changes direction with every move. Tony's current suits work by distributing that weight evenly over entire skeleton. My test suits concentrated the load at the ends of the legs and distributed it to the calves. Which in turn put the whole load on my thigh muscles. Biggest muscles I can bring to bear, its got to work, right? Um, no. Setting up struts to transfer the load results in rigid, uncontrollable structures- get it in the wind just right, and you have it. Move away from that narrow window of controllability and IT has YOU. Version 1: No leverage- 2 swim fins, fabric stretched between them, velcroed to the tail of a Birdman S-6. Swim fins put twisting force on top of feet. Painful. Somewhat controllable but bumpy. The fins just strectched and bent. The fins would load up, rebound, load up again. Bouncing across the sky. Boing. Boing. Boioioing. Ouch. Skybadiving for beginners. It also started to pound apart very rapidly and nearly tore off within a few flights. Needed to be stronger so I hit the workbench and made it a rigid exoskeletal prosthetic sort of thing. Version 2.0 Final: 18 inches of lexan slab like swim fins but hard as stone and rigid enough to bear my weight. 6 inches wide, fabric between them. And snowboard bindings plus cross-linked cables from the toes to the armwing trailing edges. Sail effect. Hold it all taut and you have one giant 7 foot wingsuit surface where you can try to brace the tail against the cables from the armwings, allowing you to couple the load on your feet to your shoulders. I could make it fly- briefly. The strain was unbelievable. Imagine trying to hold an anvil on the ends of your legs. With a gun to your head. You have to hold your legs out with all that strain on them. Fail to hold it out, and things got violent... Epic struggle to stay alive. Back off from full extension in a fabric suit and it just folds, changes shape and relaxes. Back off from full extension with this rigid thing and it begins thrashing around in the relative wind all but impossible to control. With a surface area almost the size of 2 skyboards, if I'd lost control of that thing I'd have never got it back. After 6 test flights I retired the design before it could kill me. Even during the brief bursts when I DID make it fly, it revealed another layer of "bad ideaness." It was not steerable. Not even close. Handled like a school bus. Like my legs were made of wood- Numb. No control feeling at all, no options but brute force. Until then I did not understand how much of wingsuit flight is done by subtle toe input. Adding flight surfaces effectively bolted to the soles of my feet effectively deletes the toes. Like flying a wingsuit with stilts on. Controlwise, your legs become amputee stumps. To make it turn I had to fold one armwing entirely and jam it downward, digging in for all I was worth just to get a shallow bank turn. Which cost me as much working surface area as the tail added. Could not turn without my bodyshape being so crumpled and folded that I was falling out of the sky. Best fallrate was 44mph. I could do THAT with a stock GTI. Pitiful. Fail to hold it taut and it will thrash you all over the sky and it has enough leverage to break limbs. Bottom line: Really, really bad idea. I got some good results with mods derived from the strut cable concept applied to just the armwings but attaching big rigid stuff to your legs is a terminally bad idea for reasons not necessarily evident until you try it. It was embarassing enough that I cut up and recycled the lexan version for the materials, and kept the swim fin attachment as a souvenir and a reminder that some of my brighter ideas, aren't, and all the theoretical ideas in the world don't mean squat when the wings hit the wind and the real effects emerge. It all made sense when modelled and assembled on the ground, and no sense at all in the air. Its a rigid black and white solution to an infinite gray area and it does NOT work unless every bit of the shape is rigidly perfect, which it never really is. Lesson learned. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Old Birdman S-6: 13.9-2k : 3:41 Tony S-Bird: 13.5-2.5k: 4:00 Tony Apache XRW/Rebel: 13.0-3500: 4:10 Definitely deep into "diminishing returns"... there's more to be had out of the Rebel for sure, a little more on top and another 30 seconds at the bottom but I've been playing it cautious with the pull altitudes and spent the season doing competition training instead of all-out max duration flight. Probably maxes out somewhere around 4:50 if I felt like pushing it and suckin' it down low, but I've sort of outgrown that and I'm not as greedy for absolute max time as I used to be. That suit demands a great deal of respect, and after busting the 4 minute barrier with loads of room to spare, I just don't feel like playing chancy with it for another few seconds of flight anymore. Canopy ride's getting pretty short as it is anyway with a Sabre 120 and I pulled high for most of the season. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

It is! More fun, although I dunno, the string method may actually be more flexible, depends on your training and skill, I mean, its easy now with yarn but when you step up to twine its a whole different story. As for the slinky method, here's a small one I found training for the real deal. Epic. Slinky. March. Hooah! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=711bZ_pLusQ This is one determined slinky lemme tellya. When it grows up to full Ideal Slinky size it'll be set loose down an untested line in switzerland where hopefully it will march on to eternal glory. Rumor has it Tony has a bigger one in the development lab right now with a GPS based guidance system. Its a bit glitchy so far and has a tendency to entangle bystanders and knock down the occasional tree when it stumbles or goes off course, but he's making progress and we expect a preproduction prototype to be available for the most experienced users soon. Just imagine this one 7 feet wide, weighing a good quarter ton stomping down a mountainside at 24 steps/sec! The debris cloud alone will be more awesome than anything anyone has EVER seen! I've already got my order in... I can't wait. Delivery does take time. You can't ship something this dangerous by any legal method so for now the plan is to set it loose with instructions and a map and have it march all the way from the plant in Florida to the user's place. So if you're driving someday and you see one of these things marching down the road, leave it alone... its just trying to get home, and there's some bird somewhere sitting at home watching the front step, eagerly awaiting its arrival and hoping against all odds that it makes it. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Slinkies. I have it on good authority that it is calculated by the path produced by a Virtual Euclidean Ideal Slinky, simulated on 3d google maps. Step sizes roughly analog to wing size can produce pinpoint accurate path rendering with some tuning of coil diameter, mass and step rate. So working up a path for a V4 might need a 200 kilo Ideal Slinky with a 6 foot coil diameter and a 30 step per second stepping rate, and for a Rebel you might start with the 266 kilo range slinky, 7 footer. Bit slower, maxes out around 24, maybe 24.5 steps/sec, but with the increased mass and stride length, does top the scoreboards for distance, steps a bit shallower, and can clear some talus slopes and trees the lighter, faster slinky might not. Your mileage may vary of course. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Well, come on, nobody wanted to take the cheap shot. Low hanging fruit, as it were. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

*THUD* I threw a transmission weighing maybe 250 lbs off a 3rd floor balcony onto a lawn once and the sound it made when it hit the lawn was JUST like that. It was the most awesome THUD I ever made. The whole building jumped. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Nope, the plant closed about 9 years back due to excessive equipment maintenance expenses. Replacing the armor plate and tires in between rounds wasn't cheap. /comic mode off/ Seriously though, they should have shown that video there. Most of the other drivers were completely untrained illegals from all over South America with no english and no concept of the damage a forklift can do, and I saw some stunningly stupid things done at that plant. They were trying to keep the plant alive by replacing the locals with illegal temps... no bennies, treated as if they were disposable, get injured, get discarded. And the guys themselves didn't help, they did everything they could to make the place a third-world environment... graffiti carved into things, peeing in the corners, litter everywhere, stealing all the tools... And a third-world safety record. That video was no joke... we had several incidents... no shit, it happened more than once... where these guys would show off how casual they were by jumping off the truck while it was still moving. And more than once, we had a guy run himself over with his own forklift. Guy jumps off, puts a foot wrong or slips, 5 ton truck runs over his foot... foot gets squished out the sides of the poor guy's sneakers. The spatter effect goes about 10 feet in all directions. Its not easy to look at. They were just as bad with the Standups. Their favorite way to drive was to stand in the compartment backward, defeating the deadman pedal with the off foot, while hanging the other foot half out the compartment, driving backward. Inevitably, one of these guys hung a tight corner through a doorway, and clipped half his foot off against the doorway. They picked up the half of the guy's sneaker that was lying on the floor, and half of his foot fell out. I wore heavy Caterpillar construction boots with a 2500-lb impact crush rating, kept arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times, and I kept my head on a swivel. That place was dangerous. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I used to be a forklift driver. I was damn good. Never crashed. I also used to use it to win bets, by picking up a dime, putting it in a dixie cup, then picking up the dixie cup and putting it on top of a post. To anyone wondering how thats possible, think Tiddlywinks. We also used to have this mexican clamp truck driver. Thats a forklift with an enormous vertical clamp instead of forks, for picking up clumps of boxes and other bulk items. I never knew this guy's name, I just called him Clampy, but he was damn good at the art of Forklift Jousting, where you use your truck to try to immobilize the other guy's truck... either by pinning it in a corner or getting a fork under the other truck and picking up one of the other guy's drive wheels. I had me a standup truck, which was far more maneuverable and a good deal quicker, but Clampy's toyota had a weight and power advantage and was difficult to escape with the clamp open wide. There were some seriously epic battles in that factory, the roar and clash of fighting forklifts, the clang of steel on steel, the whine of hydraulics and chatter of contactors, the smell of roasted tire rubber... those were the days. Anybody who's ever seen the famous Loader Fight Scene from Aliens where Ripley uses a walking forklift to beat the snot out of a 10-ton alien queen knows how glorious industrial equipment combat can be. And we always wore safety glasses. Safety First! -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Yeah but watch: The fed gov's one, absolute, overriding priority is going to be: "Which rights and how much/how many of them can we take away?" When they were determined to do Iraq despite there being zero actual logic or evidence, there was a sudden permanent outburst of propaganda... Bunch of guys from the hills at the paki border attacked us? "Yeah but we have to go to iraq." The guys didn't come from there? "Yeah but we really need to go to Iraq." 9/11 had nothing to DO with that area... "Yeah but they might have weapons so we have to go to Iraq." This time the message is going to be: "Yeah but the 2nd amendment's got to go, for your safety." The only thing that can stop one of these guys is another good guy with a gun? "Yeah but for your "safety" you're gonna have to give up some more rights. How bout the 2nd amendment? We'll start with the scary guns like rifles." But theres 300 million guns legally and safely owned by responsible people... "Yeah but its your civic duty to give up those rights for society so we have to take that away... oh, and handguns, too... yeah..." They won't do it all at once because they know damn well they'd have a Waco in every major city simultaneously and half the small country towns as well, so they'll do it in relentless little increments while casting all who complain or resist as "gun nuts" and defining "reasonable debate" as agreeing that we're gonna lose some rights and be subject to more restrictions, the question will be which ones... The propaganda will be saturation level and nonstop till it happens. Watch. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I am reminded of a dialogue in a Gibson novel regarding this exact sort of 21st century insanity: "Had us a group here once call Sword Of The Pig. What they'd do is, they'd break into factories and steal the big fire extinguishers, then recharge them with blood from a slaughterhouse. Only they'd let out that the blood was, you know, human. Then they'd go after the Jesus people when they marched, with those same extinguishers..." "Jesus." "Exactly." Starting to look like the kind of thing that could actually happen. I'm rooting for Anonymous. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Wendy I'd kind of disagree with that... I'd say its more like a combination of you being smart enough to avoid places where shit happens, and some luck. Ryoder's story was spooky to me because the -exact- same thing happened to me once... only difference was the outcome. I always keep the doors locked when driving. I did not have a gun. So I used a blade. Started in bumper to bumper traffic. I noticed guy in front of me waving his fists around, could see it through back window of his van. Next thing I know he gets out of the van approaches my jeep, punches the window and screams at me. I'm thinking "WTF?" And checked my weapon, ready to draw and act quickly if need arises, but I let it pass. Guy gets back in his truck and we all move 5 feet. Traffic locks up again. Guy gets back out of his truck and attacks my jeep again. Punches the window again, then again, tries the doorhandle, backs off for a second then winds up visibly for a real effort to break into the vehicle. The attempt to open my truck did it. When he wound up to break the window I popped open my blade, rolled the window down gave him a very cold tight smile and held up the knife- the message being, "Reach into this vehicle and you're gonna bleed out." Took him a second to realize I was armed and ready for him and in an easily defended position. His face went weird, rage turned to terror in an instant, he shut up, stopped screaming. I said "Get the fuck back in your truck, NOW. You force me out of the vehicle I'm gonna cut myself a steak!" He obeyed without a word. There is only one language people like that understand... you wanna fuck me up? I'll do you worse. Still wanna play? At the next light he had changed lanes and I was stuck beside him for a bit. I watched him like a hawk. He was scared shitless and rigidly refused to turn his head or look at me, sat frozen, staring straight ahead. If I hadn't been on top of things and ready to act, Ryoder's story tells me exactly what would have happened to me because this guy's intentions were quite clear. Its just eerie seeing an account of the other possible outcome. If I'd had a gun I'd have pulled that, but the moral to the story isn't about guns- its that one way or another sometimes a weapon is necessary to avoid or prevent violence, especially when one is cornered. Most people without experience with violence aren't exactly ready to defend themselves with edged weapons and edged weapons are notoriously chancy, tricky to use, and require actual contact with the aggressor, worst comes to worst. My grandma used to carry the cutest little double barrel .22 Derringer purse gun for similar circumstances. If she'd been limited to nothing but edged weapons in my place, she'd have got beat by the side of the road. Its a scary world. I'd just as soon my grandma retained the right to that little gun. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Not a conceal carry incident exactly, but yes. About 15 years back, bunch of latino gangbangers in my front yard about to stomp my neighbors, armed with chunks of debris and random melee weapons. Sticks, boards, rocks... Actual street experience has a way of dispelling any silly notions about disarmament being the way to ensure peace. It ensures helpless victims. It was literally happening on our front doorstep, our front door and our neighbors' front doors being only about 10 feet apart, small apartment by railroad tracks. My roommate and I stepped out to see what the noise was about and were promptly attacked, outnumbered about 5 to 1. We had no idea who these people were and they didn't bother to assess the scene, just attacked immediately, some swarthy looking guy in a straw hat tried to punch out my roommate inside of 5 seconds, and at that moment a truck pulled in and these guys started bouncing out of the back wielding all kinds of random junk weapons. Apparently the guys working themselves up to take out my neighbor had already called for backup. I ducked back inside and popped out with a 12 gauge, displayed it and racked the slide. That ended THAT. Instantly. There was no need to fire. They were suddenly leaving... very very quickly. They never came back either. If I'd been unarmed it would have gone very badly for us. I've seen instances where the same thing happened but the guy being targeted was unarmed... july 4th, 8 years ago, just after the fireworks, the streets packed with hundreds of people leaving. The cops saturated the area, dozens of cars, the gangs temporarily dispersed... soon as the cops left, they all came back out and picked up where they left off. The target was dumb enough not to have fled the area. They found him, swarmed him, stabbed him in the kidneys, dragged him to the guardrail threw him over the edge and dumped him in a ravine. I never found out if he lived. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

This. I used an 8.5 footer for most of my wingsuit career- it was adequate for small to medium suits but required careful technique with medium-large suits. After some experimenting I found it was right at the edge of workability... if I pitched in full flight at max-low-fallrate (mid-30's) in a heavily modded Birdman S-6 (basically a homemade Mach 1), it would happily tow the pilot chute to the ground if I didn't at some point fold my wings up, at which point the PC would quit bobbling around in my wake and launch. This made me religious about having a very solid, practiced shutdown sequence to make damn sure I got a clean launch every time. This also worked acceptably well with an S-Bird. When I finally got a Rebel, biggest possible suit, the 8.5 footer was NOT acceptable under any circumstances regardless of technique and the burble started causing radically off-center openings. My canopy started appearing over my right shoulder instead of overhead, which required some really neat "try to fly under where the canopy is headed" games with the suit during deployment. I switched to a 10-footer inside of 4 or 5 jumps as soon as the dynamic became apparent, problem vanished. The Rebel still needs a carefully managed wingfolding sequence to ensure a good launch even with a 10 foot bridle but at least it launches cleanly and reliably. Flew it for almost all of this season except the bigway in Perris and the occasional student, and had no problems whatsoever. I'd recommend just going to a 10-footer if you're planning to eventually get into the huge suits because 9 will be barely adequate and maybe just plain NOT adequate if you do, depending on just HOW big of a megasuit you're flying. Given how radical my deployments got with a Rebel/8.5 footer combo, a 9-footer would have been only a partial solution and I'd have had to go get another even longer bridle anyway. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I once worked in a factory that made 2-liter coke bottles. They were handled and stored in blocks called Units about 9 feet high and 4 feet wide on pallets, stacked 3 Units high in the warehouse in rows and columns roughly 27 feet tall all the way to the ceiling of a warehouse. Stable once stacked, but precarious and easily toppled when an individual 3 stack would get isolated, shifted moved or disturbed by the act of adding another stack. Someone would, from time to time, get the upper Unit snagged while pushing a 3 stack into a row, and slowly...very slowly... the stack would topple. If you caught it early enough and you were really good with a forklift you could sometimes save it. More often though, some of the bottles in the base stack would finally crumple under the imbalance and accumulated loading and you'd know the game was over, grab tight to the forklift wheel, hunch your shoulders and trust the safety cage because that sucker's comin' down, and you, are directly under it. When the toppling would begin it'd happen in super-slow-motion. The stack standing all the way to the roof would slowly, slowly lean till it was obviously suspended by nothing at all anymore and only its own inertia was still holding it up. You'd see it and know it was utterly inevitable, but the watching was like a train wreck, you couldn't look away. Long before it was actually falling, you could see that it WOULD fall and that there was just no way to stop it. The stack we call the USA appears to be built on a stack of assumptions about debt and growth built as high as the moon out of trillions of half-nonexistent inflation dollars. The only way for the whole thing to remain standing is if all those optimistic assumptions turned out to be true. But social security got looted to buy more guns. Medical care continued to ramp to infinity as if every middle class American would somehow be able to still pay when even a simple broken leg can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars- most of that wasted in bureaucracy... on supplies inflated to 500X their actual value... on whatever. The industries driven off our shores leaving half the next generation wondering how to pay off their 150,000$ college education when all they can find to work for is wal-mart. Everywhere I look, all I see are ridiculous unsustainable stacks, starting to topple, or already well on their way down, all of them dependent for their existence on an unlimited, confiscated supply of other people's money. The next decade will be interesting. When gas goes through the roof again... when suddenly impoverished McMoms can't afford to get the kids to day care and commute their Escalades to their Mcmansions anymore... when they start getting hungry... When the unaffordability of movement means property values crash again while the price of everything in stores triples...quadruples... If I had money, real money, I'd be converting it to hard assets and doing whatever I could to get it the fuck out of the country before the currency starts to go. When it does, we're fucked. I wonder how long till starving parents get jailed because they chose feeding the kids over purchasing their mandatory Obamacare insurance. Build your safety cages and put on some popcorn because this is gonna be one helluva show. We got to read about it in the news when the USSR fell apart. Now we get to live it. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.