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Someone wants to borrow my rig, and he'll load the 300 ft canopy at about .47. How bad an idea is it, any anticipated problems, is this an issue at all? Ideally he would need DBS even deeper than they are set for me at .7, right? Figure he has a 180, the canopy has got to react much slower to any input from him I guess?

His DBS should be shallower, not deeper.

Heavier suspended weight requires deeper brakes. (More weight = more forward speed = needs deeper brakes to slow down)

I'd worry that your brake setting (even the shallow one) would put him in a stall at opening.

If your brake settings are correct for your weight he will open in a stall using the same settings. He needs a shallower setting.

Gus

Tom and Gus are correct. Your line of thinking has caused injury in several instances that I can think of.
It's not exactly intuitive.

-gardner

Thank you. I guess I forgot that stall is a derivative of speed.

I will need to think more about it.

So for a lighter person the stall will come earlier in the toggle stroke, but probably be less violent, right?

stall has little to do with air speed. you can sink your canopy with zero horizontal speed and be perfectly stable and stall yourself out of the sky making a hook turn at 50mph. stall happens when you increase angle of attack of your canopy too much and it is not generating lift.

Just thought I'd share a bit of a info I got from Todd at Apex the other day. I did a skydive on a new Flick and thought the brake settings needed to be deeper. Todd said the brake settings are calculated for the canopy size, NOT the jumper. He said if I adjusted my brakes any more than an inch I would be losing way too much vertical speed on opening, even though the canopy wouldn't be flying forward very much. He also said that there are manufacurers out there that disagree... How much does this pertain exactly to this discussion? I don't know, but food for thought.

Ginny

Do you have valves on that Flik of yours?

yes

I heard of that rationale about vented tarps.

Conventional canopies are less sensitive to super DBS and easier to dial in all other things being equal.

There are few well discussed threads on the topic.

isnt it what you are trying to do on oppening to loose veritcal speed? should it read "too much altitude"?

God, fucked up when I wrote that, I meant losing too much altitude (vertical). I only shared this with you all because I never heard a manufacturer say that it makes no difference what I think about my brake setting when I test them out. But again, there are those that strongly disagree..

Ginny

My experience is that lower wingloadings have less reliable heading performance
This is a gradual degradation as W/L drops and is noticeable below 0.6 especially on shorter delays

To this point, is there anyone(c'mon fatties, own up) jumping say at 0.9 or 1 who can comment on their heading performance?

If you would be jumping mainly low sub-terminal stuff, does having a smaller canopy (say at .8 as opposed to .65) have benefit over something larger? Since numerous people have stated smaller canopies open quicker(?), and loading improves heading performance(?) Does anyone load over the standard(?) .75 for either of these reasons?

If I always had a nice landing area and knew I could never had a malfunction then I'll be jumping a 150/135 reserve canopy.

The reality is that most of my landing areas suck, line twist and line overs and lost toggles happen. When the shit hits the fan, more fabric is always better.

Then there is the canopy skill part. Most of the new BASE jumpers get into the sport with nearly nil canopy skills and BASE is no environment to develop canopy skills.

Maggot's Mojo 190 is loaded at about .85. The thing opens cleaner and faster than any other valved/vented canopy I have ever seen. However the canopy's shape gets clearly distorted with a PC bigger than a 42 with the latter being marginal.

Of course the dude with 6000+ skydives can handle that tarp anywhere.

IMO opinion a smaller canopy will inflate faster and cleaner but it will leave you with less time/more speed when things go wrong. And if you do have to land with the brakes still stowed in a line twist more fabric is always welcome. Your bones will thank you later.