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Fox, Flick or Rock Dragon at 280-290sqft (.7lbf/sqft)? For those who have jumped them which one you prefer? How many vents?
What I’m looking for is slow deep braked approaches and best flare. I’ll be also making many terminal/sub-terminal jumps and also 3-8s delays (I don’t like very low jumps)
Although there are many other manufacturers I have restricted my selection to Apex BASE for convenience.
Thanks
Seeya!

Get a Troll from Atair. They just Rock!

Trolls are for the frenchies!!!!!!! If looking just at apex,the fox is the 7/7/7 of fertilizers!

Flik. 5 vents. Try to get the center cell vent bigger than the others.

I've got a couple hundred jumps each on Flik and FOX, and maybe 50 on a Rock Dragon. The Rock Dragon is super stable in deep brakes, but has almost no forward penetration into wind. If you've only got one canopy, it's a poor choice.

I like the Flik better than the FOX because it has better penetration into wind and flatter glide angle. The venting evens out the issues with slider down openings and steep approaches (where I think the FOX is better than the Flik if both canopies are unvented).

I did my BASE course on a Troll 245, really liked the flight and flare. I also jump a Cobalt 150 in my skydive rig so I'm already familiar with its powerful flare.
I'm going with Apex because of the convenience of having a friend who is an Apex dealer.
Thanks!

Thanks Tom, I jumped a friend's Flik 308 (spanking new) a couple of times (7-9s delays slider up) and found it to be really sluggish but probably due to the low wl (0.67). The openings were all quite hard with a mesh slider (the canopy has 5 vents). Would you recommend a sail slider for terminal jumps or is it better to just get used to the hard openings?
Thanks for the center cell tip, makes total sense.

Ronaldo

OUCH!

Fixed above...Slider UP! Thanks…
English is not my first language and brain farts like this happen occasionally...
I think I would forget my name after a 9s delay slider off deployment

Did it have 4 or 5 upper control lines? How tall are you (and more importantly, what is your arm length)?

The large size canopies like the Flik 308 tend to have the toggles set for a tall, thin person with long arms. If you have shorter arms (either because you're a short, fat guy like me, or because you are jumping an oversize canopy) then you'll need to choke the toggles up a bit to avoid sluggishness.

Having 5 upper control lines will compress the control stroke (making it shorter overall), which helps a lot if you have short arms relative to the size of your canopy (and it's original flare stroke).



I'd recommend just getting used to it.

How new was the canopy? Large or small hole mesh slider? How tight was your direct control stow, and how much slider was in it?

Changing the slider type is the grossest method of controlling the opening shock. It makes really big changes. You can soften the opening without doing that by much smaller changes in packing methodology. First, try pulling more of the slider through the direct control stow, and wrapping that stow tighter. That's usually enough for almost anyone. If that doesn't soften things enough, try using tight rolls on the outside 6 cells (still leaving the center cell free and exposed) to slow the initial inflation a bit. If that's still not enough, consider a fine mesh slider (with the Flik you probably already had one, because that's factory standard), or move to a sail slider with holes cut in it (one 10 cm round hole dead center is pretty good, as are 4 or 6 equally spread 3-4 cm holes).

There are lots of intermediate things to try between a mesh slider and a sail slider.

In addition to asking for suggestions here, I really think you should e-mail Todd at Apex Perris with your questions. Especially concerning vents. My guess is if you're taking mainly 3-8 second delays, he'll recommend 3 vents, #'s 2, 4. and 6 cells. If you e-mail him, he'll explain why.