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Matt308

Glock Perfection
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Apr 12, 2005
Washington State
Who wants to guess?
 

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No guesses as to what this is? I'll have to wait until the morn to see what the forum comes up with. Hint: It has a real world application.
 
Leave it to Flyboy. Yeah I think it was in Popular Mechanics too.

Called the Skyray, this looks like a military version, used for HALO jumping. Here is some information from a press release:

skyray human powered glider skyflyer

"Tired of dawdling along at one hundred and twenty miles an hour, a typical terminal velocity for human-shaped skydivers? Can you go faster? and farther?

Terminal velocity is the point where the force of air resistance pushing up on the skydiver is equal to gravity pulling down; the skydiver no longer accelerates, but falls at a nice constant speed no matter what you try. And of course, there's that whole "going straight down" problem.

For those who would like to go a little faster (not to mention farther) there's the Skyray, an attachable wing system that lets humans go beyond skydiving to "skyflying." In recent test flights, Skyray-equipped skyflyers have been able to attain speeds over 200 miles per hour. This is the same speed range as the fastest bird, the peregrine falcon, which stoops for prey at 200 miles per hour (not the spine-tailed swift, a comparative slowpoke at only 100 miles per hour, as reported elsewhere). Sir Hugh Beaver of Guinness Breweries spent a fortune to determine this fact, and launched the Guiness Book of World Records in the process.

Three long years of development in cooperation with the University of Applied Science (Munich) have created a two-piece device. The first section is a harness with rigid back section; the harness remains with the skyflyer after the second section, the wing itself, is released when the user is ready to parachute the rest of the way to the ground. The wing has its own parachute and is recovered separately. This configuration was designed for safety (by all means, safety first) and is patent-pending.

The best distance is reached with a glide ratio of two to three and a resultant velocity of about 220 kilometers per hour. Recently, a skyflyer flew across the English Channel in this manner, becoming the first non-powered flyer to do so. Carbon fiber and aramid fiber were used in construction for strength and lightness; the whole assembly weighs only nine pounds."
 
I watched a documentary on that the other day over here in Germany. It was a German guy out of Munich that invented and for a few years now the German Spec Ops have been playing around with it.

Here is some info and some pics:

Wingman


Get ready to fly at 186 mph.

By Michael Abrams

Want to soar like an eagle? Then go with a parasail or a hang glider. But for those who dream of screaming through the air like a superhero, there's the Skyray - a solid, triangular, carbon-fiber contraption that lets skydivers shoot above the clouds at 186 mph for two exhilarating minutes. That's quadruple the air time of the usual free fall and almost twice the speed of the world's fastest bird, the spine-tailed swift.

Nearly ready for mass production, the 9-pound Skyray is the brainchild of Munich-based inventor Alban Geissler, who has designed earthbound objects from hot rods to hot-water pumps. His innovation: delta wings, like those on an F-102 fighter jet. Instead of sticking out perpendicular to the body, the Skyray's wings are angled back, eliminating the need for a stabilizing tail and making any kind of spin - the fatal flaw of many a wing suit - impossible. When the high-speed joyride is over, the jumper pulls a rip cord and parachutes in for landing - wings still attached.

Geissler had never skydived before he came up with his invention, and since then he's managed just 25 jumps. (His girlfriend gets jealous when he flirts with death.) So he turns to Christoph Aarns, part owner of Dädalus, one of Germany's four drop zones. Aarns has a wife and two kids and is obsessed with safety. For playing guinea pig, Aarns gets 10 percent of Geissler's company, Freesky, and, of course, he can take a Skyray out whenever he likes. (Geissler has recently added a second test flier, Patrick Barton.)

After Aarns' first flight in 1999, he had a few suggestions for Geissler. "Velcro is not a good idea when you're flying at 200 miles per hour," he says dryly. The wings also had no handles, and Aarns had to eject from the suit after the turbulent ride. A few prototypes later, Aarns is now able to fly the Skyray "instead of it flying me." After squeezing diagonally out the door of a twin-prop plane at 13,500 feet, he dives straight down to pick up speed, then grabs onto the wings' handles and zooms across the horizon. "The Skyray is like a bullet," he says. "It's like an arrow." Bull's-eye.
Wired 11.09: Wingman
 

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the concept's been around for a while and i believe information's been posted on here before... although it may've been annothe site, one issue for the special op. guys, how the hell do you get rid of these things on the ground? nothing says "we're here boys" like a big wing ;)
 
Spec Op guys aren't going to wear a hundred pounds of gear. They are going to go in with minimal stuff, get the job done and then swim off shore and get piced up by a Sub.
 
Different missions require different loadouts.... Sometimes I went in with no more than 10 pounds on me, others I had over 100lbs strapped to my ***...

As for common combat applications, Spec Ops-wise, this thing is almost useless... Erich posted up about this awhile back, and the general consensus was the same...

Would be alot of fun to strap into one tho...
 
I think alot of the guys who come up with these ideas are lacking common sense, watch an action movie and think the stuff they see might have the tactical or technilogical value, I blame 007 and the XXX series for this whos with me?
 

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