lurch

Zzzzzzzzing! That was awesome. That was, like, There Is No Spoon, but I eat with it anyway. I say, Billvon is a duck, which means he can divide by zero whenever he damn well feels like it, and use apostrophes whenever he wants to, even with words like "nukular" which don't even have an apostrophe yet. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

"Hell is defined as a life apart from God. We are quite literally in hell right now." I love this argument. It implies a certain wonderful freedom from that all important sense of religious dread and drama so many seem to feed on and seem determined to spread to others. What if I happen to be dread-proof? What if I am neither impressed with the threats of punishment nor motivated by promises of reward? What if I just don't fear? What if I LIKE hell? What if my idea of paradise is an eternity without a god? With nothing to be afraid of? Its how I've lived my life already, anyway, and its largely been a life full of wonder, adventure, friends and laughter. If thats hell, I'll take it. People impressed or intimidated by the concept of "hell" lack imagination and go entertainingly ballistic when they find the fundamentals of their beliefs they do not question just stubbornly fail to apply to certain people. Even if you grant hell a literal definition of burning torture, lets take an extreme example of a highly developed masochist that gets off on pain and torture. There can be no hell for that person. That person is free, even from "god". You can't torture someone who enjoys it. It just frustrates the hell out of the torturer and the supposedly tortured victim winds up laughing their ass off and experiencing great pleasure. Hmmm. It seems there is a motivation problem here. What are you gonna do now, -not- torture them and say "There! serves you right, you villain, now suffer, dammit!" Oooo, scary. Now, see, this is where a little sophistication and experience pays off. I'm not a masochist, I don't get off on pain, but I've been hurt before and am not intimidated by it. I recently got my hand severely burned by oil spatter while cooking. Just a "pop", and suddenly one finger was half coated in 400 degree oil. About 1/4 the skin on that finger promptly melted off. "Ah shit" I thought, "better get cold water right now cause in a few seconds this is REALLY going to hurt." Determined not to let this freak me out or really bother me I just dunked the hand in cold water, then proceeded to finish cooking my damn dinner thinking "Yup, that hurts like hell alright, oh well." Then I started grinning. It was really no big deal once you get your mind around it. Fuck it. Its just a burn, not the end of the world, not a crisis, no drama needed. All part of the adventure we call life. Everything I know about stoicism I learned from the Japanese. When threats of pain or torture or "separation from god" whatever thats supposed to mean, don't hold any power over the individual, the individual cannot be punished. Oops! Whats god gonna do now, come up with something even more vindictive to punish me for exempting myself from his little system? The whole thing makes no sense, but I do enjoy watching the religious play their little games talking about hell. Its like a cartoon and I deal with it with the same indulgence any polite adult does towards the natural imaginative ignorance of children. "Yes I'm very scared of your god's scary superpowers, now go play." If this comes across as condescending as all hell, its supposed to be. Its satire, intended to communicate what religious certainty looks like to me, endless pompous asses stating their opinions as if they were facts. Its not nearly as condescending as having some twat telling me he knows I'm gonna experience torture forever because I don't buy into his belief system claiming that through this "god" he understands the deepest mysteries and motivations of the universe and I don't. Believers know exactly as much as I do about the greater scheme of things: Nothing. At least the nonbelievers are free from the delusion that they know how it all works and why. Nonbelievers are honest. We know that we don't know what or how or why everything exists, we're comfortable with that and totally unafraid to admit it. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Ah... my mistake... your ability to quote scenes from more than one RE flick indicates you have extensive zombocalypse training, and I will defer to your expertise in this matter. Now the Polyshok, (links dead by the way but I googled it) looks VERY appealing and FAR more effective than any of my choices. If I HAD to forego Polyshoks and was stuck with my basic slugs though, perhaps they could be rendered more effective as dum-dums? The old "cut a cross into the head of the bullet" thing? Does that even really work? I'm sure thats illegal along with pretty much everything else these days, but during the zombocalypse I understand the state would tend to be a bit lenient with firearms laws... after all, they can't win the next election if they stick too tightly to the rules and their constituency gets eaten. Zombies don't vote. And I agree with your take on edged weapons- which is why I choose swords over the tomahawk. Chopping weapons have a tendency to get stuck. For good Samurai technique, look up "redneck katana", a tool used for sword training to teach how to properly choke off a sword swing before it gets embedded in your Zombie's pelvis or something. The tomahawk is only for when your swords are either lost or broken but you still want something more effective than, say, a Rambo knife or a straight razor or something. I also recommend carrying one last ditch weapon, can be coiled in a wallet and is easy to improvise with: a 3-5 foot length of titanium wire. Worst case scenario you grab two pieces of almost any small nearby debris, wrap a bit of your wire ends ends around the objects for use as handles and now you have a combat garrote. Hand-based rotary fighting techniques derived from the movement set of a good spin kick and you'll be popping off zombie heads in style like the barfight scene from Book of Eli. Plus you can use it as a rabbit snare once you're well clear of urban areas, as well as applications such as friction saw or log-drop trap for securing your sleeping quarters against any stragglers. Its hard to eat brains when you've got a 300 lb log on your chest. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold it. I hate to be scornful of your choices here man, but... a crossbow? Come ON, thats got to be one of the least effective anti-Z weapons I can think of! Might as well try to fend em off with a handbag from Macy's. I mean, seriously... shoot one in the groin with a crossbow, the zombie looks down and thinks "Hm. A Prince Albert." And keeps right on coming. If you target one from 200 yards, you could spend the entire time it takes the Z to cover that distance methodically firing and reloading, and by the time it arrives within brain-eating range all you've done is make the Z look like a porcupine with all the shit sticking out of it. I'd even gladly take Kennedy's smaller handguns over THAT. Remember man, these things aren't alive anymore. Blood loss, impaled organs don't bother them at all. Even a crossbow bolt right in the eye is unlikely to have much effect unless you manage to punch it through the orbit and spear part of the brain reponsible for motor functions. You have to do enough nervous system damage that theres simply no way for brain to activate legs (and jaws). And until you do, suckers just gonna keep coming... -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I dunno... Kennedy I still say you're thinking small. Granted, a .454 doesn't hold much ammo, and granted its got comically ridiculous recoil, but I personally adhere to the philosophy of Steven King's Gunslingers... giant caliber, know how to use it, and never, ever miss. After all, we're not worried about the ergonomics and manageability for concealed carry or anything. The only thing that matters is, what is likely to take the most Zs with the least ammo expenditure? If you know how to use your Casull and take the time to truly aim, its one round per zombie. Same reason I favor 12 gauge slugs over rifles. I'm not even sure I'd trust 00 buckshot. It'll blow em back a ways and I'm sure 00 buck is impressive against humans but unless you get the neck at close range, a Z is likely to just accept that its got a lot of 00 pellets as impromptu body piercings and keep coming anyway. You can't afford to be carrying weight in ammo thats not certain to put one down with every round fired. Haven't you ever seen the first Resident Evil flick? When the zombies were packed tight in close quarters, the investigation team blew through all their assault rifle ammo in the first few seconds and the Z's just kept coming. Plus, with a .454 its actually somewhat more forgiving of less than perfect aim. You might have to blaze off half the contents of your .45 ACP before the Z starts to notice it is accumulating holes. But say you aim low with your .454 and get one in the collarbone 3 inches off center? You still just took off the head, the neck and assorted shoulder meat. And even if you don't permanently put down the Z with a single shot, the shock of having a cubic foot of tissue blown off anywhere on the body will certainly get the Z's attention and is likely to be extremely disabling I.E. take off a leg or an arm or sever the spine. The downside is you can't carry all that much ammo for those things, and when you're out, its down to chainsaws and tomahawks again. For further training videos I suggest 28 Days Later, any of the Resident Evil series and Return Of The Living Dead. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Jesus fucking decaying shambling Christ not one of you has a clue and you're all going to wind up zombiefood. THINK, people! Do you seriously believe the undead will be impressed with your quasimilitary rifle groupie toys? All that flashy ballistics, penetration discussion and debate over hydrostatic shock is so much overtechnical masturbation with these guys. You unload your entire weapon into one zombie, it punches a bunch of holes in it and the zombie shrugs it off and keeps coming anyway. You gotta blow big chunks off em just to slow em down. These guys are already dead. They don't care about an exit wound the size of nebraska. The only way your rifles are going stop a zombie is by either perfect skull-center headshot or by chainsawing a leg off via sheer ammo expenditure. You need to get serious about long term survival. My personal zombie apocalypse loadout when completed will include: A jeep or large truck, preferably a diesel. The vehicle counts as a weapon. Machete hubcaps preferable. A Remington 870 shorty 12, pistol grip, 8 round pipe loaded with alternating 00 buck and rifled slugs, preferably Magnum. .454 Casulls, at least 3 of them in Ruger Redhawk Alaskan for sustained fire without stopping to reload and easy draw for relatively short range/melee range zombiedropping. The point is, when your shottie is empty and theres more coming and you don't have time to reload you burn these off to keep them out of grappling range or buy some time to draw your edged/melee energy weapons. So you're out of all ammo now and the pile of bodies in between you and them has slowed em down so the hundreds are now only able to come at you in twos and threes, you switch to: Your ever handy Hammond and Gates 200 CC auto electric restart chainsaw with optional Camelbak fueltank. This is good for as much as 3 hours continuous full throttle zombiehacking if you're under assault from all sides by thousands, and good for several days of intermittent heavy use if you're stuck wandering whats left of the city on foot and want to keep it idling at your side. In a recent press release Hammond and Gates announced they working on the eco-friendly Hybrid version which allows instant response time and 30 minutes of backup power even with the gas engine turned off, but rumor has it the weight penalty of the added electrics doesn't pay off in the field, where you could just carry two Camelbak tanks for less weight and more available armed-weapon time, even when left idling. Prominent weapons experts recommend sticking with the older technology for the time being and waiting for either the 2.0 beta version or the results of long term reliability testing, citing the advantages of basing personal powered melee weapon choice on the more established and mature internal combustion technology along with its proven track record of efficiency durability and reliability. u6 The tactical community is still divided on the issue of whether the silence of the Hybrid version is enough of an additional advantage to make it a truly worthwhile weapon to carry. The gas version has been known to attract and alert nearby zombies due to the steady noise of a running chainsaw, whereas the part-electric Hybrid version opens up new options in chainsaw-ninja evasion strategy. Research in this vital field has been somewhat hindered by the Zombocalypse enviroweenie corpse-huggers who object to the unfair advantage a silent chainsaw grants the user and have introduced legislation to ban its use or require more study and maybe a license or something, or otherwise regulating their posession and use by at-risk civilian populations. PETZ has sued H&G Chainsaws as well, claiming the new Hybrids produce ultrasonic noise at frequencies found to be particularly offensive to sensitive zombie ears and may be affecting their mating and feeding patterns and/or subjecting the zombies to unnecessary auditory suffering while being chopped to bits. Progess in resolving the issue has stalled pending studies to determine whether zombies can discriminate between pleasant and not-pleasant sonic stimulation and do zombies really have mating behavior of any sort anyway? Studies have been complicated by the fact that it has proven to be remarkably difficult to administer hearing tests to the undead, let alone get them to sign an informed consent form. There are also ongoing debates about the safety and stability of the antimatter core fuel cell technology available in the most recent Hybrid models. A study released by Consumer Product Digest magazine suggests some models may be prone to occasional rare spontaneous overheating frequently resulting in core ejection and associated rapid and unlicensed alterations in regional geology. Collection of usable evidence in the case has proven more difficult than originally estimated. In all such incidents reported to date, interviews with the nearest survivors have been of limited value due to their distance from the actual location of failure and circumstances surrounding their survival as well as their psychological condition and progress in rehabilitation. The one known close range survivor, retrieved from the ruins of a bank vault found on the crater floor approximately 67 miles from the incident and nearly 20 miles inside the blast radius, has displayed evidence of consciousness after extensive reconstructive surgery but doctors have been unable to determine if or when he will ever regain enough function to perform a decent imitation of a potted plant. -------- Eventually your trusty Gates runs out of gas. Then you bust out your dual genuine imitation pakistani-made fake japanese Samurai swords, typically available in Katana/Wakizashi sets, usually made from leaf springs. Because swords, do not run out of ammo. The short sword is particularly useful in confined quarters combat such as apartment buildings, shopping malls and Gothic cathedrals. And now both of your swords are either broken or you had to leave the last one in the skull of a particularly annoyingly optimistic zombie that kept coming even after you'd sheared off the lower half of the skull including all the jawbone with a downchop to the bridge of the nose. What was he gonna do, headbutt you to death? Anyway you're swordless but still in the game. You bust out your handy SOG Tactical Tomahawk and go to town like Last of the Mohicans meets Monday Night Football, fuck yeah. By this time you're either down to the last few zombies left in the world, you've hijacked a tank someone left by the curb with the engine running and you're now trundling across the empty wastes of Nantucket wreaking total havoc among all burrowing rodent populations if your path, or you just finally tuckered out under sheer weight of numbers and got eaten. Need I say more? -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Kennedy those videos... couldn't help but laugh. Darwin in action. *armchair quarterback mode* Those cops owe their lives to the phenomenally stupid "pants falling off ass" style so popular these days. If that guy had been dressed properly, calm and halfway coherent in his actions he could have taken both cops to the head in seconds at that range. On the other hand if he'd been intelligent enough to do that, he would theoretically have been intelligent enough not to get into that situation in the first place. I thought the first cop especially was actually rather slow about it, looked to me like he spent a bit more time assessing the situation as it unfolded than was necessary, certainly gave gankstaboy plenty of time and opportunity to just drop the fucking gun and live after the brief shoving when the guy started trying to walk away. I would have expected gankstaboy to be ventilated by the time he brought his gun up the first time. Homey the ganksta spends more time trying to keep his pants from falling down than he does shooting, in the middle of a freakin close range gunfight. Trying to take a potshot, at a cop, over your shoulder, (under?) while turning your back on two cops and trying to waddle away, hobbled by that stupid fucking ganksta costume. Did society a favor. Cops:1 Ganksta:0 Good shoot. *end quarterback mode* If the gankstas ever smarten up a little, stop dressing like chimpanzees and take their "role" as the opposition a little more seriously your jobs gonna get a lot harder. Of course if they did THAT, maybe they'd be smart enough not to pick a gunfight with the cops. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I've been aware of the LEAP guys for awhile now. The other group I see as very healthy among that crowd are the Oath Keepers. As I understand it they are military and police who vow specifically to adhere to the constitution and to refuse unlawful orders. I kinda wonder though, why the vicious level of hate in your posts? You seem to either have a grudge or take it real personal. "vermin" is painting them with a bit of a broad brush. Notice Kennedy's sig? The thing I notice about law enforcement and military is that such occupations tend to attract a few main types. The "representative" type seems to be big on honor, order, decency. They see themselves and their role as the only thing preventing total anarchy. One of the cops I personally know is of this type. An ex-state police captain, this guy is scary precisely because he does not look or act it. He's a slightly grizzly gray hair with a very mild, friendly manner packing a psychology degree, used to be a SWAT team ninja, and many other things. When I got to know him I kept thinking its a damn good thing this guy chooses to work for the light side of the Force because if he felt like it he could easily be the most dangerous man I've ever known. Unfortunately the other type, commonly seen on youtube and which I personally have only encountered twice, is the type that appear to specifically revel in abuse of their authority for its own sake. I've lost track of the number of times I've seen a car pulled over, seat cushions torn out and scattered on the pavement... THAT is why even normal honest law abiding citizens have grown to hate and fear cops. You stand as much chance of being victimized by them as you do thugs and street punks. If they even think you -might- have something they can bust you for, you'll get the full-on felony submission shit and your property and privacy violated. And every law on the books regarding these situations is specifically designed to render you helpless so you don't protest or resist, with wildly vindictive penalties piled on for the slightest sign of defiance or resistance or objection. When the legal system is more focused on rendering you helpless than it is on protecting you, people lose all respect for law and order. When even the most upright citizens fear the cops theres a problem. I used to occasionally consider BEING a cop. Add to the number of good cops out there by becoming one. The reason I never pursued it is simple: I would be required to do things to innocent people which I'd find morally repellent. A thing you hear a lot is "I'm just doing my job, its the law and theres nothing I can do about that." "its the law" is used to justify anything and everything law enforcement does to people regardless of morality or actual right and wrong. So if I was a cop and caught some teens in posession of cigarettes, or a 20 yr old in posession of alcohol, I could not bring myself to treat them the way the law would say I must, and put them in chains and totally fuck up their lives for these "crimes". I drank and smoked when I was underage- everyone I knew back then did. I could not in good conscience bust people for these things. My personal moral code and strict sense of right and wrong would not allow me to bust people for things that are not wrong regardless of whether they are illegal. And thats not how being a cop works. If its illegal, you have to bust em. Meaning if I come across some valedictorian wannabe, 17 year old varsity-letter wearing achiever type whos got a joint in his pocket, I am obligated to bust him, knowing full well that I am methodically destroying that kid's life and future over a stupid fucking piece of plant matter. Not because its wrong or harmful but because its against the law. I would not be able to sleep at night. The faces of all those innocent people I'd fucked over because "its the law" would haunt me for the rest of my life. Funny thing is, that sense of morality would make me a "good" cop -except- that I'd insist on using my own judgement, and a cop who does a lot of "catch-and-release" and won't enforce what he sees as unjust laws won't last long. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Illinois scares the crap out of me. I passed through once 11 years back. I have no personal issue with cops. I know a few who are good people, but this particular incident taught me some can be just plain gloatingly, deliberately evil. I stopped for breakfast at some random pancake diner off I-80. There was a State Police supervisor patrol car in the lot- gunmetal gray Ford. I get inside and as I'm eating I start paying attention to the conversation. This man of Authority was fondly reminiscing to the truckers about how he missed the good old days of the 80's when you could just shoot drug suspects in the back when they ran from you. He then told them a delightful tale of smashing the shit out of some "potheads" car because they were too scared to get out. This prick was laughing as he described how he smashed the windows, dragged em out and beat em senseless for resisting, deliberately broke up their car searching it, ("well, we hadda do the dash thoroughly, heh heh") and found... nothing. Chuckling, he says "guess they must have smoked it all." To this day I have never before or since seen or heard of such sheer, giggling malice and unapologetic evil from any human being, ever. To this guy drug laws are just target designators telling him who he is allowed to victimize, and if they're innocent, well, oops, collateral damage, was still fun to fuck em up and break their car apart anyway just to teach em a lesson in obedience. I heard this from the man's own mouth. Casual shooting-the-shit conversation with truckers. I thought I was gonna puke. I lost my appetite abandoned my breakfast half eaten, paid and left the diner. And wouldn't you know it this guy pulled out behind me and followed me down I-80 for the next 50 miles. I tried pulling off in gas stations and waiting 10 minutes to get him to either break off the stalking or get it over with and pull me over for something, when I went to get back on the on-ramp he was waiting for me and continued following me until he lost interest and simply disappeared. I was scared to death. I was innocent of anything but that fact did not matter. I was from out of state, looked like 3 days on the road, driving a beat up 4x4. Prime target. It took numerous benign encounters with other cops who -could- have hassled me and didn't, plus getting to know a few as skydivers years later to convince me that this may not necessarily represent a common attitude among cops. Strangely, I'd found the cops I encountered in California to be totally cool and laid back, enough so that I was never scared of them or saw them as a threat. At least the ones -I- met, were the good guys and acted like it. Funny, I'd heard so many horror stories about Cali cops, but all I had to do to get along with em was be halfway polite to them. But so help me I wish I'd had a camera, in Illinois... Criminals don't scare me-I've lived in bad places and I know how to handle "gankstas" and "gang-bangas". But I've never been as scared as I was hearing this guy run his mouth. With good guys like him, who needs bad guys? At least with street crime, its fair and acceptable to defend myself any way I can. If this guy had decided I was his next target, I would have been street meat. These days the police have an image problem: The message they send is "Anything other than 100% obedience gets a beating and you can argue your rights to the judge." But any message OTHER than that undermines authority and would tend to encourage idiots to think it was ok to get physical with a cop. I know its got to be a pain in the ass to be a cop and far more so with citizens stridently jamming cameras in their faces. But those cameras are the only means of self defense left to those citizens. I know you're not supposed to think in terms of "defending yourself" from law enforcement, but as the many videos captured by citizens show, SOME means of doing so is necessary. At least the cameras are civilized. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I looked over your pics. Then I put some thought into the thought processes YOU must be using to produce this stuff and where you think you're going with it. Your approach to this may have some potential. If you dial in your forces beforehand as it looks like you're trying to do the resulting hardware should at least be a lot more refined than mine was by the time you build it. I will tell you what I can if it will help you. Looks like you've got a lot more patience than I did. Every time I built shit I rather brutally forced the object into existence. I knew nothing of sewing. I did that shit with a 50$ portable sewing machine and a bunch of handheld hole punching tools. Broke a million needles before figuring out a crude modular laced construction method that was fast, semi-accurate, and most importantly, indestructible. Build a wingsuit like a buckskin wallet out of 550 spectra line and you could use the suit to tow a truck. Looks like shit, but if you tie off the spectra with a dozen layered surgeons knots using fucking vise grips, guess what: It won't fail. Knots that big DO get fuzzy, though. I think you're on the right track with feeling your way through it with the hardware. I spent far more time refining the armwings than the tail as soon as it became apparent which line of inquiry was going to deliver more results more usably. The big version was a successful use of strut and sail effects. Put simply I had zip-on singleskin wings going from the wrist and trailing edge of a Birdman S-6 all the way to the ankles. The wing ended squared off about 4 inches out, with a line from there to the toe. In practice this worked even more awesomely than I thought it was gonna. Back off on the wings and fly dirty in a flock and the wing just goes limp, folds back out of the way and flutters a little. NO dramatic effects on flyability at ALL. Slightly bumpier due to more loose fabric if you weren't maxed out, but I could still dock cleanly in a flock with it. Max out with the suit and then deliberately pull the little lines taut with your toes, and half the suit turns into a giant angled sail. I flew it once at a major event. Theres a thread around here somewhere. It created a minor buzz when seen in public. I put maybe 70-100 flights on that configuration. Any time I didn't want the wing or complexity, just unzip it, unclip the toecables and the S-6 returned to stock. In time I kept the zipons tucked in a wing pocket as a sort of instant zipon supercharger anytime I wanted a 3.5 minute solo flight. It became basically a daily driver utility option for that suit until the Tony S-bird came out and I won one in a raffle. I eventually cut the wing back to a triangle and deleted the toecables. The thing about the toecables is, fuck up the deployment and you can toss a pilot chute through the loop. The suit was a horseshoe mal waiting to happen. Extremely unlikely, but very, very possible. So flying that hack created a permanent need for extremely careful and deliberate deployment management. To make matters worse that suit had a tendency to make you go head-low during deployment with the wings folded because of all the loose fabric below the waistline which is exactly what you DON'T want if you're trying to keep the pilot chute away from your feet, so it was VERY tricky to fly and always made me nervous. The S and X bird suits were the first suits to hit the market that beat the performance I could get out of that hack. So when I got one, I retired the hack. I still keep it as a backup suit. Heres where I kinda disagree with you about max flight though: If you're doing it right, its actually not that tense, or locked in position, flying the ram-air S-Bird I use as a daily driver. So far, Although it took years of straining in the wrong directions to learn it, the longest flights I've had are ones where I sort of "got the feel" just right and relaxed in a very specific, certain way. I've had flights of 3:15 where I was shaking like a leaf after, because I was trying way too hard and flying it all wrong. End of last season I set a new best of 3:57 while flying with a vicious leg cramp. I was laid out wide and flat and "sprawled out" the way a suit the size of an S lets you do, while mostly focussed on trying to relax that damn cramp or at least keep the cramp managed enough that the leg doesn't lock or fold on me entirely. I was distracted as all hell, thought I'd already blown the time attempt and just spent the whole flight staying as sprawled as I could while trying to relax that one muscle while still keeping my legs out and toes pointed. I wasn't overthinking the "max out the suit" thing. I didn't think I'd beaten my own record until I watched the video after I landed. Because I was distracted I wasn't trying too hard, and I wasn't even all that fatigued out after that flight nor was I shaking or experiencing any extreme muscle fatigue. And this was with an off-the-shelf factory Tony suit. The most effective body position, I didn't feel strained, I was just sort of cruising around easy while trying to manage that cramp. Within the "max-performance envelope" of flying like that, it doesn't FEEL rigid or restricted at all. If I pull in a wing I know I'll start to drop faster but the expectation and relationship are very instinctive and very linear. There are a number of "enhanced performance ninja moves" that are somewhat rigid but they're not the only way to get long glide and slow fall out of a suit. Theres what feels like an infinite variety of variations on body positions that have various effects on "max". Because the suit is totally "fluid", you get exactly as much wingsuit action as you feel like engaging and know how to do, controlled by how far out your arms and legs are, and how good you are at fine tuning a rather "general" working body position. With rigid surfaces, control is binary. It is either snapped into place and flying or it is tearing your arm off. A wingsuit can smoothly transition from maxed out to gradually curled up in a ball and not flying without any major abrupt transitions. I was betting on my understanding of this relationship when I tested the lexan stuff. My worst case scenario: curl into fetal position with armwings spread wide and pull legs in to belly... basically sit on the wing in freefall and dominate it with the armwings. This trick got me out of lesser spins in a single snap roll, is useful for regaining control of flopping rodeo passengers, and I figured if that approach to managing a floppy object attached to me works with something as big and draggy as a passenger it ought to work to keep control of a lesser slablike surface. It did. When it got too hard to handle I could just scrunch up and keep flying it anyway. Point is if you want your concept to work and keep the flight feel you're going to need to make your hard surfaces articulated and flexible enough not to significantly impede the movement of the wearer. Let the wearer decide the shape and just shape the surface so its ideal, at the most comfortable flying position of the suit you wish it to be a part of. This is why the superhard ram air suits work as well as they do. Since they take their own shape they tend to self-optimize but still allow fluid movement. So essentially what you're trying to do is pull off a functioning substitute for the wingsuit ram air effect with hard surfaces. Think scaled armor. Overlapping plates. So that the wingshape just smoothly stops being wingshape and ceases to exist the further back you bring your arm. If you design this right, you won't need to worry about it buckling because if the strain got that high you'd just bring your arm in a little since you couldn't hold it out against that wind anyway. Looks like your initial modeling approach lends itself well to being made in such a way. In fact your "out the car window" tests would be very good for this: Heres my suggestion: Right now your results are very binary. Either it is in a narrow working range or it ragdolls your arm against the side of the car. It will do this in flight. What you need is the same thing that makes a wingsuit so fluidly controllable: Segment it so you can just pull your arm in. In practice the result you're looking for is the ability to not just "turn it off" but modulate it. Only extend it halfway and its halfway effective without restricting your range of motion or ability to extend or retract the arm. In practice, making this shape real, strong, snag resistant and effective will be very difficult but CAN be done. What are you using for materials in your models, and what materials would you plan to make a real one out of? Your model looks like some kind of light .010 maybe .015, .020 plastic? The trouble with modeling that way is you spend a lot of time solving construction and materials problems that only approximate or just don't apply to any attempt at a real working model. I strongly suggest next model is made of thin sheet lexan. My tail was made of heavy .220 lexan which was ridiculous overkill but typical of the way I build brute force physics hacks. The structures you've made, if made of lexan half that thick simply will not buckle. They'd bend into a U shape under tremendous strain but to date I have never succeeded in loading lexan to a permanent crumple failure like what happened to your wing there. If you made your zigzag wing structure of sheet lexan you'd have to jump up and down on it to even stress it. The machine screws you used to tack it together will shear, but the lexan won't permanently deform unless you drive a screw into it and focus tonnage on a single point. You CAN make lexan crack if you use it wrong or rip the screws through the material. You would have to ditch the panhead machine screws you're using and predrill holes about .010-.015 bigger than your fasteners to allow for metal expansion without cracking the lexan, use stainless buttonhead cap screws and locknuts inside. A wing made that way, you could beat it with a 12-lb sledgehammer without seriously damaging it. And its light... Legal Afterword To Cover My Ass: Anything and everything I say here can and may be inaccurate, and almost certainly will. Any attempt to construct and fly any device based on any advice I may offer here is regarded as suicidal, stupid beyond belief, and is extremely likely to result in death or disability. In essence, everything and anything I say about wingsuit design and construction, if you follow it and do it all right, you're still going to fucking die instantly so do not even think about it. Some, most or all of what I say is or may be purely for comic/entertainment purposes with no obvious indicators as to whether there is any fact in any of it. Building actual flight hardware of any kind is done 100% at your own risk. Building and flying anything based on information some idiot put up on the internet would be a phenomenally stupid thing to do, guaranteed to result in your death. Do not do it. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Ok tellya what: I'll lay out a few of the practical issues I ran into when building that thing, kinda give you an idea what you're up against when trying to make tech to manipulate these forces. What stopped me wasn't the "build it and fly it" part. The reason I backed off was the combination of controlling those surfaces, struts or no struts, and making any such thing actually usable and worth its weight and complexity in performance. Bottom line is the performance return on tail scale alone wasn't even close to worth the physical complexity and clumsiness needed to somehow nail another 5 square feet onto the tail. And keep in mind the end was a 2nd gen hack. It barely had time to get complicated, it was as simple as an exoskeletal setup can be. First model used swimfins, fabric sewn between em, velcroed to my S-6's tail plus reinforced straps and shit. I had to walk backwards to the aircraft and hop backwards up the stairs. I dubbed this activity "Skybadiving." Now, see, this is what happens when a hang glider gets raped by a pogo stick. You get this thing. I bounced across the sky. The fins loaded up till they sprung forward into the airflow at which point they'd recoil again. Big, wobbly airsprings. Boing. Boing. Boioioing. I eventually got the surface to settle and functioning as "a tailwing surface" but it took such a convoluted, straining leg position to do it that it totally trashed flying the suit. "Flying" that tailwing fucked up the rest of my body position beyond belief. Best fallrate: 44. Hell, I could do THAT with a stock GTI. Pitiful. The entire suit mod setup included zip-on armwings that went to the ankles with little spectra strut cables clipped either to the toes or to the tail extension if I was using it. The sum total wingsuit was gigantic. The armwings worked very well on their own. Used alone they delivered performance you couldn't buy in a commercial suit for another 3 years and helped balance the tail a -little- but the tail was still so far from flyable it was silly. 2nd gen was bigger and far more rigid- lexan slabs for about 3 square feet of hardwing surface and more fabric. This had snowboard bindings to spread the load and transfer it to the back of my calf. The fins version either broke my toes or put a brutal load on the top of my feet. This new version still allowed limited ankle movement but coupled most of the load to the lower legs. It wasn't as floppy as the fins in flight and far more stable when I COULD get it to fly- but there turned out to be way more emergent effect dynamics in there than I suspected till I tried it. Changing one thing changes a whole shit ton of other things you won't see coming. Turns out I had no idea how much flight skill and feel involves the toes until I deleted them. It totally ruined the wingsuit flying experience. All the nimbleness, gone. Effectively my legs were made out of wood. I could steer, but only by either A: Digging in radically with one armwing, sacrificing any semblance of body position to get even a sluggish turn, or B: Back off on the tail until I'm "flying dirty" with the tail just flapping behind me unloaded, at which point normal wingsuit characteristics dominate and I could turn something like the way I was used to. Which is a complete waste of all that wing flopping around. It took brutal muscle strength to support armwings even close to big enough to balance that tail. And once again, I found that the muscle loads and body positions necessary to "fly a wingsuit" and "fly the tail" were not compatible and could not be made so. Straining to hold that tail out and open did bad bad things to everything else about my body position and the performance gains, although not insignificant, were not even CLOSE to enough to justify further tests. And keep in mind by this time I'd already successfully transferred most of the load to my thighs, strongest usable muscle. Where can the structure go now? Up the abdomen? Couple it via cable/struts to the shoulders, top of the harness maybe? Great. Now your whole torso is loaded up structurally and thus partially ineffective for use as "your body." Get it? The thing about adding rigid wing structures is that it goes from "The wing is a part of your body and feels and responds like one" to a very unpleasant "Your body is part of the wing and feels and responds like it." Its brutal. Restrictive as hell. Interesting but not fun. My next and last tests were a wingsuit developed from scratch to test certain design elements related to the internally strut-braced wingsuit concept. This wingsuit was well known and somewhat notorious due to its outlandish construction and appearance: The Hardcase. It was so wild looking nobody noticed its technical complexity. Made starting from a 40 year old hard leather biker jacket and a bucket of spectra line this suit is... bizarre. And it looked fucking cool as HELL. What got no attention at all was that it incorporated about a dozen unique/original wingsuit design bits. Miniaturized 3-ring release cutaways built into the zippers. 2-piece construction, wingpants and jacket. An emergency "nimbleness" cutaway that could sever the entire suit at the waist granting instant freedom of movement. Structural elements put together with spectra lacings like buckskin clothing. And much much more. Variable wingspan, relocatable wing attachment points and an adjustable harness made mostly of braided nylon webbing integrated into the suit. So by harness tweaks you could set exactly HOW far you can stretch your toes and HOW far you can spread your wings until they're tight. You know what I got? The worlds most restrictive wingsuit. It was like a flying bondage fetish experiment gone bad. It flew just fine and delivered average performance comparable to other suits of its size, but wearing it and flying it were excruciating. You know what happens when you transfer wing load via harness? It goes SOMEWHERE ELSE. Somewhere uncomfortable. It proved that I could set up a suit designed around a certain body position and braced internally to optimize and hold that position. It also proved that such a setup is inherently restricting as all hell. Your arms need to be just -so- for that strut effect to work. So while its working you're tightly restricted to whatever body position makes the strut shape. Design the suit around the body position AND the strut shape and you've just frozen yourself in place. Anytime you're NOT in ideal strutshape for that suit you're falling out of the sky like a rock instead. There is very little middle ground. It can be made to work but the tradeoff is you can barely move. Suit gets bigger, start adding exoskeletals back into the mix and it only gets much worse real fast. This is why pretty much everyone else who has ever tried to pull off this effect is dead. They went straight from "don't know shit" to "beyond controllable" in one step. I did it real gradual, snuck up on it like, and lived. Turned out not to be worth the effort except for the stuff I learned. Several years more development of this would result in a wingsuit that weighs 20 lb, has all kinds of struts and joints and hinges and tech tricks to make it easy to use like flip-up fins and quick releases, flies like a lip full of novocain, carries 10X the risk of a standard wingsuit, and gets you... a whopping 10 mph better fallrate than you could get with a ram air suit 200X simpler and safer and infinitely more fun to fly. Relative to "how much more" you can get vs the amount of risk and complexity needed to make it happen a certain way, exoskeletals are not worth the effort or the risk. This thing was SIMPLE as such concepts go yet the mechanical complexity and interplay needed just to tack on that tail surface were ridiculous. With the tail I had to execute an elaborate 28-step airborne-Houdini post deployment sequence to get that thing off my feet and secured for landing, hung off my chest strap. I was deploying at 4500-5000 feet and it took me at least 1000 to deal with the goddamn tail. Lemme tellya: You ever thought about just how difficult it is to take snowboard bindings off your feet under canopy? All that risk and complexity just for a simple area hack that barely flew for shit. Anything you build and test must be compatible with existing skydiving equipment: Can you get a pilot chute around this thing? Can you control it if one side fails or suddenly catches wind, flips inside out and gets pinned that way? What if you fatigue out and can't control it at full strength, is it going to kill you? Mine would have, and it was still so small it was lightyears away from being landable or even repeatably easily flyable at all. If I'd lost control of that thing I would have wound up in the mother of all unrecoverable flatspins. Odds of survival would be very, very low. The lesson is that making wings bigger than muscles can EASILY handle ESPECIALLY outside the skeleton's natural reach gets infinitely more lethal with every inch you add. You start fucking around in this territory you are up against something like a 97% fatality rate. You exit the plane with big rigid shit strapped to you, you better be SURE. If you don't get it right, you are dead. No time no negotiation no appeal no parole. Game over in one shot. If it isn't close enough to what you already know how to handle, again, you are dead. Immediately. This is why I haven't built more stuff. I got the answer I was looking for. It wasn't the answer I wanted or hoped for but it was an answer you can only learn by doing. The answer was that trying to distort wingsuit flight too far from what it is now, destroys the experience. You tack on anything bigger than your skeleton and that part of your airframe goes numb and radically reduces the abilities of the limb it is attached to. So much so that it isn't worth it. Not even close. I could have added rigid armwings. Small enough to be controllable, big enough to be effective. I'd already proven to myself that I could effectively design and build such a thing since the tailwing technically "worked" just fine. Then I would have had numb arms AND numb legs. World's biggest, clunkiest wingsuit with piss poor performance and wooden feel. Yuck. Those experiments took me places alright, places it turned out I didn't want to bother going to. I finally reached the conclusion that a device already exists to perform that 30-0 mph part of a flight. A canopy. -B This is something people like Giselle don't want to hear. She made a lot of la-la-la noises trying to drown out and not hear the fact that I've done what she's making noise about-fabricated this kind of gear from scratch and test jumped it to find out how do-able it really is. I was disappointed. Making it wasn't as hard as I thought. Get far enough into making it WORK and you'll either evolve into Yves Rossy's carbon wing or a canopy. Neither is a wingsuit. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

I think I can tell you why they killed a design like that. Same reason I killed a design with a tailwing designed similarly. Human skeleton cannot take a surface area anywhere near that big, that far out on the ends of the limbs. It was bad on my legs- arms would be even worse. I made a 7-foot wingsuit once with a semirigid tail surface stretching about 18" past the ends of my toes. It was technically flyable but the leverage action of the air on a surface area that big, that far out was almost enough to break my legs. Like trying to straight-arm a 60-lb anvil. It took all my strength to keep that wing open for any length of time. And when collapsed, wings that big, with the ability to exert THAT much force on the ends of your limbs are VERY difficult to control. I only flew that particular prototype 6 times. I wasn't going to survive many more attempts. It was a VERY bumpy ride. My survival was seriously in doubt every time I tried. Its a good thing I knew my true limits because a couple inches bigger and I wouldn't have survived the first flight. Based on personal experience I'd say adding an 8-10 inch circle of surface at the wrist/outer edge of an arm would be very difficult to control, or keep spread open, but you might get away with it. Thats not much bigger than the area supported by typical grippers these days on the biggest suits. A 12-15 inch disc would be almost totally unmanageable and anything bigger than that would simply make a ragdoll of the pilot's arms. You'd be utterly helpless to control such a thing, in freefall, at arms length. One thing those flight tests taught me thoroughly was that the future of wingsuit performance is NOT in adding vast surface areas at the very outside edges of the human body. We are simply not designed to support our own bodyweight loading at the ends of outstretched limbs. This is also why the most successful high performance wingsuit designs these days all rely on maximizing useful loaded area down the sides of the body roughly between elbows and knees. S-Bird, X-bird, most of the taut, active wing surface is along the body and supported by the upper arms from elbows to shoulder, not out towards the edges of the wingspan. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Bravo!!!! (applauds) Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Wuss. My brother and I did steel wasps. It started with doubled over paperclips in a V with a rubber band. Similar to a "stinger". We then progressed to launching cut up 1 inch pieces of coathanger wire bent into a V or a U and small slingshots made of coathanger you could hide in a sleeve. Those were NASTY. Eventually this evolved into mass-manufacturing ammo with a vise, a pair of pliers and a box of 1.5 inch finish nails launched from elaborate multistage slingshots using heavy post-office type rubber bands. Not only would these things either lodge in or blow right through the acoustic tile ceilings in the school cafeteria, they were awesome for fucking with faculty at extreme sniper range from across the gym. These suckers would bury themselves in the wooden bleachers from a distance with a loud bang. At home in development tests we discovered at close range it would punch holes through the ceiling fan blades and go through one or two thin pressboard tray tables, 3 empty milk jugs and 4 boxes of cereal. As a kid I experimented with a great variety of high velocity or high energy phenomena. As a result, there were a lot of strangely shaped holes in things all over the house. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Yes. UX is just the art of going places people normally don't go or aren't supposed to go. Doesn't have to be sewers. You could combine SCUBA with diving a quarry but its a good way to get dead... major deep water, cranes and cables and god knows what abandoned under the surface, entanglement structures galore, frequent zero visibility, underwater rockfall hazard off the walls, As a kid I prowled railroad structures, abandoned buildings, storm drains, several cranes and quarries, crossed a river via the structures under a major bridge... Suggested gear selection: Really badass steel toe boots-you have no idea what you'll be stepping on or climbing . Heavy leather/denim jacket for protection/gear storage At least 3 different light sources. Preferably more. If exploring drains, up that to 4 or 5 plus spare batteries on you somewhere for at least one or two. The idea is to make absolutely certain you are never without light. It'd really suck to be 3/4 mile in a storm drain 60 feet under some street and have your last light go out. I once lost one in a bottomless vertical drainpipe, and had two others fail. The last maglight got me out. I thought it was overkill carrying 4 lights along with all the other junk in my pockets. It wasn't. Cellphone Rope is optional but can and has come in handy. 30-50 feet of something that'll hold your weight in a pinch. Mechanics gloves Latex gloves Bail money. You're probably trespassing. Even if the object you're exploring appears long deserted there is certain to be a rule somewhere against exploring it. Count on it. Some such objects may be under startlingly high maintenance surveillance. Exploring quarries and such as a kid I repeatedly set off infrared detectors and provoked aggressive reactions from security people before I learned of their existence. Fortunately I was a pretty good junior ninja. I was seldom seen and always escaped except once, and the cops let me go anyway. They just wanted me to get the hell out of the storm drain. Apparently spotting a 12 year old kid through the grate at their feet happily travelling manhole-to-manhole alarmed them somewhat. Can't imagine why. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Well, although I admit Siemens' technical prowess is unmatched, having worked recently for a Siemens subsidiary I can't help thinking all that "green" tech they're so big on is probably being made by enslaved non-union afro-american baby seals working 25 hours a day for 2c an hour with no health insurance in a sweatshop in Bangladesh who are trying to compete against an army of destitute amputee chinese pigeon-farmers living in sustainable environmentally friendly cardboard boxes in an industrial complex half the size of Nebraska just outside of Beijing. Baby these streets are MEAN... -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

No offense Divr, but betcha don't, actually. Neither was a union shop. Osram got that way all by themselves. I was told that much of the system failure at Osram was due to excessive management deadweight. Bored authority with a stick starts looking for excuses to use that stick to justify their presence, get to feel like they're doing something useful, make themselves believe they're performing a necessary function. There are subtle cultural influences involved. Osram is german owned and there was a heavy german cultural influence on the way the place was run. Half the controls on the machines were in german. I don't have a particular problem with germans or Germany but there is a very distinct flavor to german culture. Exaggerated to a stereotype, that culture is very rigid. They like everything in order... their order. They're big on permits, bureaucracy and rules for the sake of having rules to follow, and to impose on others. Top-down control of everything. With no checks on that philosophy and a management style imposed from above whose -only- goal was to extract as much possible cash out of the machine (for the entire plant is really just one big machine) as possible before HID lights lose the streetlight market to LEDS, that vague cultural tendency ran amok to the point of being a ridiculously exaggerated caricature of the base culture. You do NOTHING without permission there. Working for Thermo I had a free hand to tweak or modify damn near anything I felt like provided I followed 3 basic rules which I pretty much wrote myself: 1: follow industrial standards of construction: Fuses and circuit breakers. No duct tape, no electrical tape. 2: don't do stuff that alters the process or product. and 3: when in doubt, consult my manager... who was a cool guy with whom I worked on many projects. At Osram the simplest change to add, say, an optic triggered airgun bracket on a sticky infeed chute required feasibility studies, Engineering has to do lots of studies, make proposals, formally create a procedure to decide which proposal is the most logical and economical and in line with the longer term management goals for that machine, gotta create blueprints and submit em for approval by Osram High Command, anything electrical gets passed to the Electricians who must then have more engineers design the addition to the machine and interface with Mechanical Engineering to build it and tie in to the existing hardware... So major problems never get fixed. Mechanics are not allowed to fix them. Only to perpetually unjam the rail. And their idea of "proper" is, the act of fixing things like this must take months, it must involve a great deal of procedure, and it must be very expensive while simultaneously being as cheap as possible. Whereas, at Thermo, as soon as I'd identified the need for pulsed air based on parts presence at a given location, I'd say "Hey Boss, mind if I add an airgun to that sticky link rail on the o-ring infeed? Figure I'll give it an optic pickup, pop it loose every time we get a bad batch of O-rings and one stays hung there. Think I can do it mostly out of spares stock, might need to order some air line and bits, few hundred bucks max, no other effect on the machine, set it small enough so it can't affect the parts or put dings on em or anything. How bout it?" Boss says "Ok give it a try, I wanna see it before you fire it up." Prototype is assembled of industry standard compatible parts and being tested within a couple hours, by the end of the same day I've drilled tapped and dressed up the hardware and made the mod permanent. Doing all the electrical, mechanical and pneumatics myself. Problem is solved. At Thermo they grew to rely on me generating "instant machinery" on request. I didn't have to worry about whether I was "allowed" to do anything. It was "Use your own judgement." At Osram, anything not compulsory was forbidden, and failure to comply with compulsory was, of course, heavily punished. I still tend to agree with your attitude toward unions... I've never worked a Union shop. I don't want to. I've interviewed at several, and they came off like Osram. All kinds of things you're not allowed to do because thats the engineers job or the electricians job or the plumbers job or the facilities guy's job. My new place, the only barrier I've run into was proposing to create a new loading fixture. We do a lot of aerospace, defence and medical. Once a process, no matter how crude, has been established for in-spec production of a product, and approved and formalized, nothing can be changed about the way it is being done, for fear of introducing unnoticed variables and subtle, long term product quality variations. I can understand that and work around it, respecting the formalities that DO exist. This job has the most variety of any job I've held yet. I do everything electrical except major revisions to building power. For THAT they will employ an electrician. But I do lights, plumbing, robotics, anything and everything mechanical, furniture, pneumatics, troubleshooting of any kind... near-total freedom. I've got the run of the place. As soon as my supervisor got the idea that I was casually capable of all this they just cut my leash set me loose and got out of my way. I'd take this over some tightly defined union job any day. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Bill, sometimes the "evil pigs" perspective, although dramatized and exaggerated, isn't all that far from the truth. Last 4 years I worked for Thermofisher Sci as an automation tech. I built them lots of robotic production gear, mostly relatively simple end effectors, end of arm tooling, simple relay logic driven stuff out of whatever I had at hand. Stuff that was still working years later. I was rewarded with fat raises and bonuses and awards and stuff. I loved it there. I was also their on-call robotics rescue guy and I did it well. No qualifications at all, just earned it in pure ability and street cred. I felt quite well appreciated and I felt I was being paid what my work was worth. Thermo breaks up my plant and sends my job to Rochester NY, Petaluma CA, and Tijuana. Suddenly the company's attitude changes. They want to send me to Tijuana at base pay to set up my gear and train the same people getting my job. People not capable of DOING the job. They didn't want me to just set up my own gear but resurrect all the robotics they'd already sent there which had promptly been wrecked by the staff there. I was told of robotics being operated -by hand-... like a flintstones car... drag the arm to the pickup, pinch the gripper, pick up the parts, drag the arm against the dead servos over to the dispensing slot, release. The combination of being expected to help the company put me out of a job while dealing with such catastrophic idiocy was more than I could take and I refused. I was paid well to stay till the end and left the company in decent shape. Landed a job working for Osram Sylvania in an arclight factory in just 6 weeks. I was excited... for about 2 hours till I got inside on day 1 and learned how the company likes its culture. Osram's single dominant priority was to keep employees intimidated at all times. This was not one or two managers... this was the entire corporate culture. There was only one topic of conversation at cigarette breaks... whats the next psychotic thing the company will do? Whos gonna get punished next for what insane reason? Constant ominous threats of termination or suspension for nonexistent safety infractions depending on whos interpreting the rules this week. A behavior that is expected, even demanded by management one week gets you suspended the next. Rules in opposition to themselves... Everyone lied on the paperwork at all times about maintenance because it was physically impossible to comply with all required conditions. Example: machine max: 1200 Per hour. Fall below 1100 average and get threatened with termination. Maintenance requirements... PM's, cleaning, quality control... Fail to clean and PM, get punished. Clean and PM and your output drops below 1100 get punished anyway. Elaborate lockout tagout protocol for simple cleaning. Fail to follow whole procedure, get punished. Follow procedure and you get enough downtime to get punished anyway. Machine breaks even once, fix it in a frenzy, desperately trying to keep under 5 minutes downtime, output falls anyway, get punished anyway. In 112 degree heat. Needless to say my motivation to excel like previous job vanished almost immediately. They had high expectations of me because I turned in a higher score in aptitude tests than anything they'd ever seen and I laughed at their "high pressure" exam solving all 4 problems in under 90 seconds each. Nobody had ever solved all 4. On top of all this I was dealing with the most complex machinery I'd seen to date, while saddled with a grossly obese coworker physically unable to perform the job function let alone at the speeds they demanded. They told me, straight up, that I was expected to do most of this guy's job too, and match the output of first and second shifts, staffed by seasoned veterans who knew the gear and could track down root causes much faster than I could, and I was expected to match them immediately. With a millstone around my neck. "We know Steves not working out but we expect you to make the shift work." Poor Steve had already long since been mentally beaten into total submission and behaved with the classic lab rat "learned helplessness" depression and lack of initiative. I didn't blame him in the slightest. I gave it everything I had anyway. I eventually worked out a priority stack that allowed me to work much faster but without the "desperate frenzy" they demanded. Lacking anything concrete, I was eventually written up for "Not looking urgent enough." By this point I was like "Fuck you. Fire me." And I'd keep right on working. Incidentally they were also happily mercury poisoning the employees. The two most senior guys on the Mercury Vapor line had characteristic twitches and shakes, violent limb jerking, visible neurological problems, skin issues... I looked this shit up, these guys were displaying what looked an awful lot like massive, classic mercury poisoning symptoms. There are vast amounts of mercury released and accumulated in these machines. No attempt at collection containment or abatement. Every surface coated in a gray mud of accumulated oils, silicate shards and mercury oxides, that gray scum mercury becomes if you just leave it exposed to air. This place will be a Superfund site when it closes. The mechanics were expected to clean the broken arctubes, hundreds per day, out of these machines with their hands and no respiratory protection. Ask for a respirator or question the heavy mercury exposure and they come off with an attitude like "Everyone else deals with it, so should you, thats the job now go do it." Meanwhile 2 rooms away where the arctubes are made, there are pressure gloveboxes and all kinds of protection... because OSHA's ruleset insists. Because that part is actually "manufacturing" the tubes and thus qualifies for serious control. Meanwhile in my area we're sucking it up because the company can get away with NOT having those same protections. It took 8 weeks to get fired. When they tried that intimidation shit on me I just folded my arms and stared at them. By the time they got the idea, I was seething mad. I will NOT be treated like that. 8 weeks later I get found by a headhunter and land a sweet job in a tiny little semiconductor plant. The place is crazy and disorganized but happy. Nobody's scared, everyones laughing and joking and being productive all the time. Theres lead dust, acids and fluxes and lots of solder but I can have all the respirators and gloves I want and I can take the time to do the job safely, and do it right. Nobody cares what I'm doing or how fast, just so long as I run around and fix things. I rewarded this attitude by cranking my motivation up to 11, redoing the lights, the plumbing, everything... ordered megabucks of parts and fixed stuff thats been broken for years. They're falling all over themselves to express how happy they are to have someone who actually cares about the job. I've got it made here. Some places actually have a clue how to treat human beings. Some do not. Osram was so unbelievably nightmarish it was as if they were deliberately trying to be an exaggerated caricature of the "evil company" image. There is a pervasive corporate culture prevailing at least throughout that facility that treats the employees as if they were disposable company property with extreme hostility and demands that they accept and submit. And they wonder why they can't get quality people to work there. The only thing separating me from everyone else working there is I know what I'm worth, I've worked for places that knew how to treat me and with my skills I can survive no matter what so even in this job market I was NOT gonna put up with their shit. I've been preparing a report for OSHA about the mercury. In detail. Osram needs to be punished for this or they'll just keep doing it to the next guy who gets my job. The conditions they have deliberately created and maintained in that place to save a few bucks and squeeze out a few hundred extra arctubes a day are fucking appalling and I could not believe a place is run like that in the 21'st century. My new employer, I'm doing everything I can to keep em happy. This is a good place and I could stay here for years. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

"after nights of drinking my freinds and i would go to a busy drive thru and when it was our turn to order" I just laughed my ass off for several minutes straight. Thats some funny shit right there... Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Well, if you're looking for high altitude power you might need a turbo. I've driven at that altitude a couple times and air that thin would seriously tax even the Golen. On the other hand the Golen has enough excess power it might do ok even at that altitude although it won't be nearly as vicious as it is at sea level. There are long, straight, moderately steep on-ramps around here where the stock jeep would pull ok and deliver slow acceleration to about 80. I tried it on empty highway once with the Golen block and the sucker hit 105 going uphill with no sign of slowing down or even getting close to its limits and would have been doing 115+ by the top of the hill if I hadn't decided "this is just fucking stupid" and backed off to semilegal 70's. And this is with an as-yet unresolved fuel delivery issue costing it some balls at the top end. I gotta give it to Chad Golen... guy built one hell of a jeep engine. I'm only a few miles from his place so when it was done I stopped by his shop and took him for a ride, gave him a turn at the wheel himself, and even for a guy used to building 5-700 HP engines, driving a jeep that freakin' fast put a grin on his face. I guess he's built over 100 of em but hadn't had a chance to drive one himself... he just specs em builds em and dyno's em. His tech support and quality are top-notch... you got problems during installation, you call, you get the man himself. For the money you get: Speedpro hypereutectic pistons and plasmamoly rings, Block decked honed and bored, Scat stroker crank, balanced and blueprinted, Aftermarket high-nickel head casting, bowl porting, 3 angle valvejob, oversize valves, Comp cam, pushrods and lifters. Head milled to accomodate heavier springs and hardened valve locks. Compression jacked to 9.2, Melling high volume oil pump, Cloyes timing chain, Clevite bearings, and you supply the 24 PPH injectors. It works fine with no changes to stock computer and the sucker fired up in less than 3 cranks the first time I turned the key. Since then I've had to learn to exercise a LOT of restraint when I step on it. Launching into an immediate 90 degree turn to get out of a gas station it'll light up the inside corner easily...back off and it'll keep right on spinning it till you back off to almost no gas at all. I've put on one or two accidental smokeshows in traffic and drove away feeling sheepish, yet the power delivery is so linear and nonabrupt its difficult to get it to light a tire in a straight line. The one thing you got to watch for is, the tranny computer takes awhile to adapt. If you make a major mistake in timing exactly when you romp on it during the first few dozen miles, the damn transmission will learn it, decide thats the shift pattern you wanted and repeat it for you. I made the mistake of stomping on it hard enough at 75 to trigger a double downshift it had learned from my previous erratic driving. The stock engine just couldn't wind up fast enough for anything bad to happen and it never had the balls to make me yank my foot off the gas in a panic. The Golen responded to a double downshift by instantly slamming the tach to redline and lunging violently with a louder roar than I've ever heard out of a jeep. This caused me to yank said foot off the gas via startle reaction and faceplant the wheel, in turn teaching me that high compression vehicles have far more effective engine braking. Doesn't seem to have bothered the engine. I got to drive it in light snow for the first time today. Drive it like grandma and it'll get 20.9 to the gallon. Not too shabby. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

That'd be the Golen Stroker, yes? Wasn't cheap but you get a HELL of a lot of engine for the money. It'll smoke any jeep ever built except maybe a 6 liter SRT8, and it surprises the hell out of stock camaros and mustangs. Ricer punks with fartcan exhausts are easy prey. The stroker is badass. It was a direct bolt-in, did it myself with a lot of help from a friend with a garage and some patience. It needs at least 91 octane and 24 PPH injectors. With no changes to exhaust or intake the cam and headwork give it a lovely ominous rumble, goose the gas and it barks like a raging dog. I didn't need to change anything inductionwise. There IS a high rpm glitch, misfire on cyl.1 close to redline which I think is caused by fuel pressure dropoff due to either slightly clogged fuel filter, old fuel pump or both. The engine does have its quirks... the cam and valvetrain are heavily tweaked. The valvesprings are so strong they squeeze the lifters down when it is parked for awhile so when it is started cold it clatters and shudders till the lifters pump back up, then it runs so smooth you couldn't tell it from stock except a very faintly lumpy idle due to the cam. The payoff is, the old 4.0 would run out of balls above 3-3500 rpm. The stroker on the other hand... open it up and it turns into a raving monster from 3-5200 rpm. If I let it spool up it actually gets more and more aggressive the higher it spins. If I shift it manually to keep the engine spooled up and restrain it from upshifting to 3rd at the first opportunity, then punch it while floating at mid rpm range it will slam you back in your seat and break all 4 tires loose on wet pavement. Yes, even those BFGs. 320 Fp torque beats most stock smallblock V-8's. The first time I heard and felt it spin the FRONT tires I was seriously impressed. The Grand Cherokee is fairly heavy but with this engine it launches like a Porsche. So far I've put 2000 miles on it and I'm quite happy with it. I once drove a late 70's T/A 6.6 and this 6 banger jeep would eat that Pontiac for breakfast. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Ok how the HELL did you do that? Whats the trick? Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

Second this. I drive an '00 grand cherokee with an aftermarket 270 HP 4.6 stroker and BFG AT tires on it. Its like a really fast, all terrain luxury sofa. -Properly used-... the thing is near-invincible in snow. I'll take the auto jeep over a 2wd stickshift -anything-, any day. If its really, REALLY slick, putting it in 4-lo locks the front and rear shafts, autotranny in 1st and let it creep along. Stick shift or Autos got little to do with it although an Auto can actually be more forgiving if you keep it in 1 or 2, float the engine and avoid sudden throttle moves. The 4wd is a great asset both for going, and stopping, although taking advantage of the 4wd for stopping does involve a bit more deliberate technique. The jeeps got ABS but the idea is to avoid making the jeep use it. If I feel the jeep start burping the brakes it means I'm pushing it too hard for the conditions. I live in New England and to me, driving in snow is fun and challenging. I leave anywhere from 3 to 10x normal following distance behind car in front of me, look for outs constantly and assume near-zero traction at all times. The name of the game is "Don't spin tires, don't spin jeep, don't hit anything". If I'm about to descend a slick hill I look for the edges and take advantage of any deeper snow I can find. Deliberately getting half-stuck in snowbanks and using the resistance to keep the vehicle on a tight leash. In an emergency, curbs or front yards are not off-limits. When it comes to driving in winter the tortoise always wins. The problem isn't people in 4wd SUVs. The problem is people in 4wd SUVs who think the vehicle automatically makes them invincible and relieves them of the need to drive intelligently. Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.

This one gets my vote for coolest flash game I've ever seen. I got 3488 meters in one flight. The trick is to conserve fuel. Avoid using the engine unless you have to and save all the fuel for tiny steering corrections, short taps on the keys just to bring the nose up a hair. I let the various cranes and yellow stars do all the work of gaining altitude. The art of keeping your paper plane aloft is actually very similar to the feel of using back risers and thermals to get back from a long spot. Fun. -B Live and learn... or die, and teach by example.