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ENTER THE FISHIEST CYCLE— THE REDFISH DNAs VELOMOBILE
under development
SPECULATIVE SPECS:
-skin-on-frame construction incorporating novel principles (patent pending)
-i don’t really believe in intellectual property since all understanding issues from the world and is therefore a debt to be repaid, but practically it’s a necessity given that the skillset of the average engineer at large cycling companies seems to consist of trawling the internet for ideas to steal and a soupçon of talent at formal subsumption, and they have the brouzouf to bury you before you’ve begun. open source plans for simple low-cost construction will be released eventually
-16kg (35lbs): significantly lighter than existing production velomobiles, almost on par with an upright steel framed bike, minimizing the velomobile’s disadvantage in terms of climbing and acceleration
-estimated CdA of 0.06, allowing for ~45km/h at 150 watts in neutral conditions, i.e. a power output most reasonably healthy people can maintain for an hour. real world aerodynamics will probably be slightly worse but still in the realm of other production velomobiles. if you’re new to them, this is roughly 1/10th the aerodynamic drag of an average upright bicycle, and the increased efficiency means that long distance travel in car-based geographies becomes practical even for non-cyclists
-initial cost less than half of what existing velomobiles go for (typically around 10k USD) without sacrificing much performance, with the long term goal of being as cheap as a decent production bicycle (~2k)
-236cm long x 99 cm tall
-79cm track width, 119cm wheelbase
-outboard wheels: this is a compromise inseparable from the design chosen, they do worsen aerodynamics relative to designs that have the wheels enclosed in the fairing, but the body is streamlined enough to largely compensate for this. they also have the advantage of greater track width, the possibility of using disc brakes and the virtual elimination of brake fading due to overheating, and vastly improved turning radius
– to wit, 3m vs. the 10m or so typical of inboard wheel designs
-20×1.5″ front wheels, 26×1.9″ rear
-ultra cheap rugged and lightweight 2×8 drivetrain, Microshift index/friction thumb shifters paired with a bottom-of-the-line Altus rear derailleur, i.e. the Grant Petersen special. 58-39t chainrings and 11-34t cassette giving a 29-136 gear inch range; you can get away with a slightly stiff low gear in a velomobile because you don’t need to maintain your balance on climbs. the non-luddite and non-economic reason for this choice is that, as G.P. notes, the Altus has possibly the highest ratio of cage length to chain wrap of any rear derailleur, allowing for a compact drivetrain that can be fully enclosed in the velomobile and isolated from the elements. also it works really well and weighs no more than a high end 12s 1x group at the cost of having to adjust your cadence slightly more (and even then 11-12s cassettes beyond 32t bafflingly tend to have the exact same 11-13-15t high end spacing as 8s, which represent the highest jumps percentage-wise [going from 11->13t is nearly 20% cf. something like 17->19t which is roughly 12%, furthermore the high end is the only speed range in which having fine gradation actually matters so there’s almost nothing lost by sticking with simplicity)
-optional electric motor w/ regenerative braking
-mechanical disc brakes
-front and rear suspension
-intrinsically safe and collision-absorbent: the rider is fully enclosed by the vehicle frame, which is designed to sustain a head on collision at 50km/h without failing, and beyond which will still absorb a significant amount of kinetic energy. furthermore the vertical and lateral buckling loads are in the realm of 3000lbs. a critical feature for this type of vehicle since you never know when the latent homicidal impulses of the motoriSSt toward the subaltern-coded, whatever the accuracy of this summary judgment, will coalesce out of their host’s typical stupor. from the legal & technical infeasibility of mounting an ATGM on a bicycle arises the need to adopt a strategic “Tortoise’s Pose”
-modular: individual frame and body components can be repaired or replaced as necessary and with minimal complication
-easily foldable and even deconstructable with simple tools for storage and transportation
-you might think it’s silly to ride around in more or less a low-poly fish. 1) i agree 2) i would argue that it’s marginally less so than riding around in a giant dutch clog or a time trial helmet 3) in a world where time is subsumed by abstract value, the engineering fetish for eternally metastasizing efficiency isn’t totally decoupled from people’s realities on the ground. as Jan Heine says, efficiency gains are just as valuable if not more so at slow speeds as they are when racing—ideally we’d take the time necessary to walk everywhere LIKE BACH But ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 4) i promise it’s gon be a silly night. if you’ve spent any real time as a wage slave (not the metaphor it’s often construed as) you already know that the compounded misery of this hidden spatial majority of the world can only be maintained through a de facto system of apartheid for the dispossessed, one component of which is the economic enclosure of movement. i came to this idea in the first place because i was wracking what brains remain to me as to how, in the semi-abstract, i could flee an increasingly rabid country as a poor person with little in the way of money, resources or tooling. modern velomobiles are probably the evolutionary endpoint of cycling and human powered movement in general, but they’re far too expensive and impractical in terms of storage and transport to become more than a niche for people generally not lacking in resources who forswear car ownership for ideological reasons. after forty millennia of cultivation, the Redfish DNAs velomobile has precipitated from the clouded alembic of history to square the circle of the triangle of performance-cost-reliability (with practicality as the hidden fourth term that circles back to the square), hopefully leading to the mass proliferation of free human powered movement
-i’m also working on a sailboat
“after forty millennia of cultivation, the Redfish DNAs velomobile has precipitated from the clouded alembic of history to square the circle of the triangle of performance-cost-reliability (with practicality as the hidden fourth term that circles back to the square), hopefully leading to the mass proliferation of free human powered movement. I’M also working on a sailboat”
-THE Sandshifter