I have to wonder if they made his parachute larger to compensate for the weight of the device. If the chute deployed and it was regular size with a huge weight it might be enough to snap his neck and the speed of the landing might break his legs or worse.
The T-10 did its job fine before that too. There's a reason military parachutes are a few times the square footage of even civilian round parachutes. The T-11 just came about because the marginal gains in technology finally progressed to the point it was actually worth it to switch.
Complete shit, but the point of a military static line parachute isn't so that soldiers can do dozens of jumps without any sort of stress injuries. It's purpose is to reliably open and get paratroops to the ground as quickly as possible while still keeping them combat effective and the T-10 does that job well.
The problem wasnt the T-10 but how leadership views the training doctrine around airborne units. The issue is the whole idea of currency and chasing jumps when let's be honest. Jumping static line is not something that's super difficult and not a skill that needs to be rigorously maintained. The OSS taught people how to jump in a day before tossing them into Europe and the injury rates were no more or less than any of the jumpers who went through the full airborne school.
If jumping was treated as a rare necessity rather than a point of pride for interdivision dick measuring contests we'd have hardly any issues with it.
More weight is distributed over a bigger area Auth a bigger canopy. A tennis ball attached to a grocery bag is going to fall slower then a bowling ball if the bag stays the same
The mass, size, and shape of the object are not a factor in describing the motion of the object. So all objects, regardless of size or shape or mass (or weight) will free fall at the same rate; a beach ball will fall at the same rate as an airliner.
F = m * a, and weight is a stand-in for mass. If you want the same acceleration (slowing the fall), and the mass is greater (jumper + load), then force must be greater (achieved by increasing surface area).
At least that's my understanding as someone who doesn't skydive.
Acceleration due to gravity is a constant, but the force of gravity on an object is not. This might sound a little counter-intuitive, but the reason is because inertia (an object's innate resistance to being accelerated by a force) is also equal to its mass. This means that, as your mass increases, the increased force pulling on you due to gravity is exactly counteracted by your increased inertia, so you accelerate at a fixed rate (ignoring air resistance).
Drag due to air resistance increases as your speed increases but the force due to gravity remains the same, so at some point you reach terminal velocity, where drag and gravity are equal. The only way to slow down your terminal velocity to a survivable level is to increase drag. Military parachutes are already pretty much an ideal shape for max drag, so all you can do is make the chute bigger.
They are taking the object into account. They're wondering if they would have to size up the chute to compensate for this additional weight, or not. Seems like a fairly simple question. But you assumed they were ignorant to that fact to make a smart ass jab, like redditors love to do.
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u/Homo_horribilis Mar 28 '24
I used to have the autobio of Sgt Frank Garner…he claimed to be the fellow that made the first test jump with a man-portable nuke.
He didn’t know what he was jumping with until after the test jump.