IKAROS
INFLATABLE SLED
(a
Surfplan version)
| What's Ikaros? and
what's Surfplan? Beyond mythology, Ikaros
is an "Inflatable Sled Kite" designed by Stelios Alexandrakis (Reystos),
one of the most active and helpful members of the
Foildesign mailing list.
Ikaros is intended for kitesurfing
use, and was designed with help of Sledmaker, a piece of
software written by Stelios himself.
Surfplan is a beautiful and very user
friendly power kite design software utility created by
other prominent member of Foildesign, David Aberdeen, who generously
makes it freely available for the joy of as all.
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Personally I'm delighted with Surfplan. I
followed its evolution from the first David's releases, and I
think it could hardly be a better tool for kite design and plans
plotting.
Kitesufing kites are one of my strongest
interests, and I was sorry that as Surfplan is still rather new
there are no .SLE files available for study.
Then, in the process of gathering information on
the Net I found Stelios' job, and recognized Ikaros as a well
suited kite design for my own purposes.
So my next step was to try to generate a Ikaros'
replica in .SLE file format, in order to analize it's parameters
and perhaps modify them easily if I want to do that.
And here is the final result:
What you see in the above picture is the half
wing planform of my Surfplan version of Ikaros (red),
superimposed to the original Stelios' design (blue).
As you see both design's panels match almost
perfectly, although one of them was designed using Sledmaker and
the other one was designed using Surfplan!.
Now we can have different Ikaros' views from
Surfplan:
I just showed this job to Stelios and we both
agree to make it available for anyone to download:
Download Ikaros.sle
Now you can make use of it for your own NON
COMMERCIAL purposes.
Comments and questions are welcome, but I
suggest to address them to the Foildesign group, where other
people can benefit from the discussion, and many other people can
answer questions better than me.
Finally I want to thank Stelios and David, and
invite you to their personal pages:
I also suggest:
Foildesign
The best group for power kite designers and hobbysts.
Leprofil
Also a very good group (in french).
Ing. Marcelo Fornaso
http://marcelo.fornaso.com
.