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Troubleshooting downward 180


frob
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Based on feedback, I've increased my sail tension even more than before, and added longer leaders by an additional seven inches or so.  This gives much deeper arc on the leading edge from the tension, and all the brake means leaning back about 1.5 feet when the handles are vertical.

Leading edge curveStrong include due to brake.

With these adjustments, the drive on the kite has changed significantly.  Some of it is for the better, the kite moves much slower and more controlled, and takes less pressure before catching the air. Unfortunately, with the changes when making 180 turns it feels like all power cuts out. Sometimes the kite flips itself into a glide I didn't intend, with the wingtip inside the turn falling toward me and laying flat (0:22, 0:30, 0:59) for a difficult recovery. Other times it de-powers, forcing a landing or crash (0:08, 0:30) . Still other times (0:45, 1:02, 1:20) I can pull through it; the power loss has several waves, one where it catches itself after the turn, another where it hits the wind wake from the previous pass, and then it stabilizes. When it happens the kite does a bit of a swooping motion, easier seen than described. Here are some clips.

Before the adjustments, less brake meant easier recovery and tighter turns.  Is this an expected amount of stall, or turbulence, or whatever it is for proper adjustments and I just need to compensate for it with practice, or is there something you can see in my actions or tuning that needs to improve?

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Three hours today and I'm a bit more consistent. I switched lines a few times and found it easier with longer lines, 15 feet instead of 8. Adding a small upward swing before the turn also helped a little. Unfortunately that put me at risk of hitting the ceiling on the long lines. 

In positive terms, I managed eight in a row downward 180 turns at one point during practice, and I had to abort less than half of the time near the end. Upward 180 turns are much easier.

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After watching a bunch of videos today hunting for downward 180 turns, that stall seems an unavoidable part of the maneuver.

From a bit more watching, people generally leverage the downward 180 as a lead into another motion, and rarely use it to continue on as a forward-drive 180 turn.

From assorted indoor videos it seems the downward turns are used to lead into a bicycle (especially Watty and John), a larger circle (more common for Brett Marchel and Amy Doran), lead-in to an axel (Brett), a lead-in for a long glide (common with Paul LeMasters & Conner Doran), and especially for transitioning to reverse flight leveraging the stall to reverse (common for John, Paul, Conner, and many other people's videos). Fletch was the only person I could find in videos who regularly used the downward 180 to actually reverse the direction of forward travel, and those turns often included the kite trying to lay flat and stalling briefly, exactly what I've been experiencing.  For a few people (like Mario Di Lucca) I couldn't find many downward 180 turns at all. Most of those transitions benefit from stalled motion.

The upward 180 seems to be the direction reversal of choice, downward 180 is a lead to something else.

All that watching made me wish there was something like other sports statistics. Like percent of freethows made, statistics of how often particular baseball throws are made, or in this case, the percent of time specific maneuvers were chosen.  But alas, it's just watching YouTube at faster speeds and watching for specific actions.

 

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