Jacket BC or Wing BC

[MauiScubaSteve]

You are dwelling on things that have nothing to do with my complaints about sloppy typing of anecdotal opinion as if it were fact.

I showed the plagiarized picture of Sas for the wing; that's all I was speaking to, the coefficient of drag of the wing. For all I know that is the very beginning of a dive, using something like an HP120 tank, before she has added argon to her DS.

Even at the end of a dive, with minimum weight needed for the 3 meter SS, the entire wing is still there, perhaps having even more drag all deflated and flapping. I am often still chasing manta rays for a picture at the SS.

Just looking at the bladders, compare Sas's BC to the British rocker's BC below;

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[Sas]

His/her fins are pointed upwards and s/he appears to be flailing his hands around. This is what you get when you have a jacket BC.

 

[MauiScubaSteve]

Or Billy Morrison gracefully used his appendages to both quickly hit the brakes from full speed scootering to full stop and attain a pretty good pose while holding the scooter off to the side so I could get both him and the young turtle in the pic.

I'm only using the pics to show the difference in frontal area between a wing and a vest. Inflating a vest kind of makes a diver's body shape change from a somewhat whale shape to a somewhat plumper whale shape. The plump whale shape seems pretty streamlined in the water from the whale footage I have viewed. A wing bladder extraneous to the divers body does not remind me of any shape I would call streamlined in the water.

 

[Sas]

A wing bladder extraneous to the divers body does not remind me of any shape I would call streamlined in the water.

Who cares about streamlined? BP/W looks way cooler.

 

[MauiScubaSteve]

...,to you. BP/W looks way cooler, to you.

 

[k ellis]

Wow talk about an old thread the OP has not even been on scubaboard in over 3 years Just had to put that in for good measure

 

[Sas]

...,to you. BP/W looks way cooler, to you.

U so jelly.

 

[danvolker]

This is a perfect example of the sloppy typing prevalent in threads of this ilk!

It is a valid statement ONLY if you include some form of IN YOUR OPINION.

Without IMO, it is an ignorant statement because it is stated as fact when there are no facts to be found.

One could say that your personal BP/W rig w/ 18# wing feels more streamlined than say an Oceanic Probe that you tested 10 years ago, but without measured data it is just a feeling.

Here we go again. Halemano and his "measured data"...This is a poor joke.

This is "delusions of scientific method" versus "common sense".

Let's say I just sent you a Pinnarello Prince ( carbon fiber racing bicycle) and also a Hybrid bike from Kmart. Neither has a computer. Halemano goes out and rides each for 10 miles. When he is finished, he has ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA which is faster or more efficient, because he had no computer with him, and no watch either.. Because he had no measured data, no amount of awareness of the rides, the speeds, the difference in accelerations, or anything could allow this poor guy to KNOW which bike was faster or more efficient.


We do a lot of scootering in our tech dives, and even some of our single tank recreational dives--as in looking for lobster. We know from trying many different BC's as well as halcyon Bp/wings, that the small Halcyon wings are much faster than the stab jackets, because a buddy wearing a stab would not be able to keep pace, without us having to change pitch of the propeller blade to slow down the scooter of the halcyon wearing diver.
Not to mention, doing hundreds of dives( thousands of dives?) with people in stab jackets that just can't glide like we do with the small halcyon wings, and with the same fins on, they can't keep up.
We have all used stab jackets ourselves, and we definitely felt the difference in glide and speed...this being the cycling anology.

In all fairness to you and your scientific pretenses, the idea that you have to control for all variables is practical.....and the typical bp/wing diver has one other advantage over the hundreds of stab jacket wearers to each bp/wing wearer....most of the bp/wing wearers actually spend time trying to get good trim and minimalized weighting, and removed all the sloppy hanging stuff that frequents the stab jacket diver ( like the 6 foot long high pressure hose to console trailling in the sand on the bottom behind the clueless). So instead of just significantly faster, sometimes a bp/wing diver will be almost exponentially faster than a stab jacket diver....the reverse scenario is so infrequent, common sense would indicate the bp/wing direction has something good going for it.

 

[fjpatrum]

...
The bp/wing with proper weighting will do any of these perfectly. Optimal trim is totally possible for many divers using a vest bc. Most will be slower, due to more drag inherent in the less streamlined form of the vest.

Am I wrong or isn't one of the most commonly spouted pieces of advice given here to "SLOW DOWN"???

I happen to prefer a BP/W to the half dozen or so vests/jackets I've tried, but to say going slow is bad when comparing BCs but good when we say most problems can be "fixed/alleviated" by slowing down, doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

 

[TSandM]

fjpatrum, Dan comes from several viewpoints that are a bit different from our usual advice to novice divers to "slow down". Spearfishermen CAN'T slow down, and efficiency is critical to them. Cave divers have to fight the flow out of the cave, and streamlining can make a HUGE difference in how much cave you get to see within your gas limits. And scooter pilots get the most out of their battery time if they present a smaller resistance to the water.

None of that is "New Divers", where the advice to slow down is extremely relevant -- but if streamlining equipment works in those more advanced settings, it's certainly going to do nothing but help the newer diver, too.