[extropy-chat] vertical wind tunnel

[Spike]

> I have an intuition that most of the time you'd crash right 
> down, tangled 
> in fabric. At the top of trajectory the oomph would be lost 
> (I sense) and 
> the chute would turn into a mess of cloth and cable, and it's 
> so hard to 
> get the toothpaste back into the tube.
> 
> Damien Broderick
> [just guessing]

Ok alternate solution: have the wind tunnel with tall vertical sides
like a big cylinder, 10 meters high or more.  Then the extreme 
ground-divers would jump into the hole, float most of the way to 
the bottom where the fan is pushing the air up at perhaps 60 
meters per second.  Then when the thrillseeker deployed the chute,
the air would be guided upwards by the walls of the tunnel,
so that she would be guaranteed at least a reasonable altitude,
from which control of the canopy should be possible.

Perhaps one could modify a grain silo in this way.

We could use a dummy mass to test the notion.

spike