Robots are cool

The term “powered up” is used a lot in kiting, and should be a pretty easy one to get to grips with, but I’m going to try to put it into words.

There was a recent discussion on a forum about how weight affects one’s ability to ‘edge’ a landboard. The gist of it was someone saying that Blades are better suited to heavy guys because they are able to edge better (I have a feeling we were actually getting our wires crossed, but let’s assume that’s what was meant for the sake of this post). This is wrong. I think the confusion comes from there being a difference between how much power the kite is producing and how much of that is usable power. The amount of usable power is how ‘powered up’ you are.

Three things affect how powered up you are: wind speed, your kite and your weight. The windspeed and the kite combined create a certain amount of power, then your weight affects how much of that power is usable. Obviously, heavier people require more power to jump a certain height than lighter people. So, assuming the wind speed and kite remain the same, but a heavy person is flying the kite, he is less powered up than the light guy. Therefore, when he’s edging a board he’s holding less usable power.

I daresay someone clever could work out a formula a little like this:

Okay, so I’m probably missing a to-the-power-of in there somewhere and I don’t know of a way to measure the power of a kite, but you get the point. Weight is extremely important in kite selection and is in direct relation to how powered up you are. The important distinction is the difference between how powerful a kite is in a given wind and how powered up any idividial rider on that kite is.

This was also posted on the Wind Things team site, but comments are closed there.