Basejumper.com - archive

http://abclocal.go.com/...zarre&id=6839225

Changed link!

that is why i heavily encourage practitioners of BASE to drink heavily to the point of a relaxing stupor before jumping. I mean, haven't you heard that it's usually the drunk driver who survives the crash that killed everyone else on the road?

Wonder if a cat would survive terminal jump from a plane..

depends on how much hair your mom has.... lol

there's a study that indicates something less than 50% fatality rate for cats from terminal velocity impact

their highest fatality rate I seem to remember was just over 50% and that was just before they reached terminal velocity

I'll leave to you as a homework exercise to use google and find that study for some interesting reading on cats and terminal velocity.

I wonder if kittens have a better chance of survival.

how about drunk kittens?

Sounds like a good experiment and really cheap, considering there are always people giving away kittens and it probably wouldn't take much to get them drunk.

It's *break* less bones.

I clicked on this thread thinking "why would relaxing make you brake less?", assuming it was about driving somehow!

This is fun, too, though. I haven't clicked on the link, so maybe this is what the link is about, but I watched a Discovery Channel show about a guy who was knocked unconscious and thrown like 3 miles by a tornado, and not only lived but suffered very minor injuries. Being unconscious just made him all bouncy and malleable.

(Kind of like your mom.)

isn't this taught in AFF level one? the PLF is essentially just 'going limp' into the ground, with a suggestion of rolling to one side.

Why do you have to ask ? I've heard you're the resident expert on all things limp.

this would depend on the cat. i have seen some morbidly obese cats out there, which would in turn be a faster fall rate, and from too much fancy feast (tuna and liver flavored), there would be a lack of excercise and weaker legs. a 35 pound fat feline would fall like a brick.

plf saved my life. even though I limp a lot of the time now.

The difference between Break dancing,
Parkour, PLF, Drunk Gushyness, and
soft baby bounce VS stiff, non-limber
falls have been well documented

The world record fall by a human that survived is something like 30,000ft. I can't remember all the details, but remember that it was a jetliner shot down over russia and a stuartess landed in a marsh and survived. She was in a coma for a long time (details are fuzzy) and the first thing she said when she woke up is "can I have a smoke".

Vesna Vulović, and another, more recent article with some debunking of that incident.


Edit: the wikipedia article seems to be failing to link because of the slavic lettering.

In the moment before I landed on my side and shattered my arm, I had the thought "Okay, I'll just go limp and plow in here, then get up and ski away".

Moments later as I was screaming your name (and not the same way your mom screams mine), I thought maybe it would have been better to tuck my arms in to my ribs instead like common sense and normal reflexes dictate. Instead, I let myself go limp (because of all these bullshit news stories about the drunk guy walking away from an accident), my arm got yanked into a weird position by my ski pole, and then my body plowed into it and left me lying there broken and feeling like a retard.

Moral of the story, if you're still awake and sober, protect yourself in an impact any way you can or you'll just end up making an ass out of yourself.

On the bright side, it looks like I might be able to make a return to BASE on Friday! PCA, Left turns, and a water landing. Nothing can go wrong

Obviously you need to use some energy as far as controlling where your limbs are and displacing force as well as possible, but it is best to be limp on impact to avoid your muscles breaking your own bones.

e.g. if your quads are locking your lower leg in place, it doesn't take as much force from a tibial impact to break your tibia, because your adding force to the system. Same rules apply to your spine, so limp on impact is the way to go, but like you said, it is definitely smart to use your limbs to protect your body and also to displace the impact across as much surface area as possible.

edit to add: this only applies to solids, with fluids it's the exact opposite. Less surface area and stiff as a board