Kite Release Fuse

[tweoistom]

Hi Everyone,

Have been thinking about a way to design out Lofting. So ideas have centered around a calibrated release that would trigger should you be pulled with something like 110% of your body weight - no firm figures yet. This would be so you could ride normally but if you experienced large acceleration it would release and flag out.

Obviously there would be disadvantages and complexities and it wouldn't suit everyone (particularly those that boost etc). Within the design could be a some sort of override if boosting was expected and then a kind of landing and launch mode.

What are thoughts on this?

[edt]

Kites already work that way. You can get about 2-4g's doing kite stuff, but once you get past 5-10g's the lines snap and the attachments rip off. Kites are designed to be just strong enough to be able to handle the hardest pressure normal kiting will do but not any more. The reason people get into a death loop is that a death loop is within the range of pull of normal kites the problem is that it's uncontrolled. Same with lofting. It's well within normal kite power range the problem is that it's uncontrolled. I mean yeah it's a good idea but it's actually already kind of already built into the kite. Keep thinking.

[tweoistom]

Yeah was thinking that it would be mostly around launching and landing the kite, I think a situation people want to avoid is 2-4g at this point in the kite session - maybe an override would be used for the actually riding.

I haven't done much in the way of sums but 2g acceleration in 0.5s would launch you approx 10 meters forward or 5 meters into the air assuming nothing else is going on. Hopefully forces resolved forces in the right way - has been a while since I have done any maths.

From what I have seen a 70kg rider under fairly normal conditions will not exceed 70kg line tension.

viewtopic.php?t=2401991

Death loops are a different topic entirely and I don't think many things with current kite design short of limiting looping in kite design will fix that.

[downunder]

Complicated and not needed at all. Lofting is not the concern. Crashing is.

Solve hard crashing and thats it.

[tweoistom]

I would say lofting is the cause of some of the more severe crashes in kitesurfing. If people aren't lofted then the main injury cause then becomes death loops and so on.

Solve crashing - you mean like something to take out the impact of someone into a hard object?

[downunder]

People are lofted more than we know.

Not all end up in a crash. When driving a car, is speed a concern?

Good luck tho, always good to see new ideas.

[rynhardt]

Complicated and not needed at all. Lofting is not the concern. Crashing is.

Solve hard crashing and thats it.

Agreed. There are many sports where education is the biggest difference between it being acceptably safe or not.

[leeuwen]

Complicated and not needed at all. Lofting is not the concern.

I agree. Lofting can often be prevented by not parking your overpowered kite at 12 and knowing the conditions/terrain.
Anton made a nice video about this here

I see people doing “jump-checks” after launching the kite on shore quite often even in super gusty conditions.
You cannot build something to make people less reckless sadly.

Getting back to the fuse part: as mentioned it is very hard to build something that can survive regular usage but breaks when needed. Regular usage has so much power variation already. It is weight and skill dependent so would require lots of different fuses.
Basically anything that has a normal usage pattern of yanking a 100+ KG 20 meters into the sky will be hard to make a fuse for that is useful.

[dice]

Nobody weighs the same, so what is 110% in absolute numbers then.
And only 110% margin doesn't seem like much. I bet if you do a megaloop, that you'd go over this numbers by a huge margin.
You don't want the kite accidentally to detach when you don't want it.


Also, lofted? Is that a new word in the kite scene? Isn't it just 'lifted'?

[downunder]

No.

It is lofted. Not a new word at all. For sure it's English jargon tho...