Archive: Mon 15 Jun 2009

Did a lot of net searches, youtube, everything.

Had a look at the videos, looked at the big ones in South Africa and France. Amazing, awesome even.

What I was trying to figure out was how to land people at the right place in one piece, give them the longest steepest fastest possible ride in the space available. The landing/stopping methods used by the competition were really not going to work on the scale needed to make this rock. I checked out platforms that swung out, raised up, static platforms, rollers, sandpits. Some places lower you onto the ground, some zipwires let you do it yourself. Some of them have a landing like a train hitting the buffers, others seemed really slow.

Anyway Enter Brian Phelps from Vertigo Pursuits. He had the answers. He said "don't worry, this is going to be amazing". During the site visits with Brian I realized firstly that I had no idea how to do it and secondly that I wanted him to build it. Until then I had been thinking that I could do lots of research and then sling it up myself.

Hmmmmmmm.

In retrospect I'm really glad I ran into Him. It might seem obvious now but we had to figure out where to put it. I wanted to cross the quarry void at a diagonal and stretch further over the Hoverworld flying field, Brian had other Ideas. "You got to think out how to get them off at the bottom" he said. Christ, I was thinking of nothing else. He saw what I had missed: the ground underneath the old access road rises up at the same sort of angle as the cable would as it swung back up from the lake to the lower (cliff) anchor points. Simple.