Slashdot Mirror
Make Your Own Cluster Balloon
Mr. Christmas Lights writes "'Have you ever dreamed of being carried into the sky by a giant bouquet of colorful toy balloons?' John Ninomiya does exactly that using 50-150 four-seven foot diameter balloons filled with helium ... and sealed with tape (duct?) and cable ties. Folks may recall the lawn chair man who floated up to 16,000 feet, but John takes this to a whole new level and his site has some wild pictures ... and includes the comment 'Kids, don't try this at home!'"
Well, it's not a 'popular internet legend' it just became one.
It happened in the eighties, somewhere around 97 it started to go around the internet with numerous facts changed, including ""A helicopter after he floated out to sea"
He actually got tangled in powerlines.
Don't these 'mythbusters' do their freaking homework? god
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
Cheers, Ryan
Hurricane Ivan: A 17th century prison collapsed. All of the inmates escaped.
a beowulf cluster?
Do I win a prize?
While normal parachutes are built to open comfortably (so skydivers dont have an acheing back after every jump), reserves are made to open rather _quickly_. A reserve can be deployed below 500m and still slow you down in time before you reach the ground.
The CYPRES emergency opening device for example deploys at an altitude of 750ft (230m). The reserve chute still has enough time to open at that altitude.
Skydivers have a problem that we would not have with our balloon cluster: they deploy at terminal velocity (around 180 km/h, maybe a little more), so at 500m they would only have something like 2.5 seconds left to react. With a cluster of balloons, ideally your initial vertical speed will be a lot lower.