BP Wings vs BCD explanation

[HKRacing]

Getting into arguments over this stuff is a joke! It doesn't help anyone and doesn't even answer the question of someone who needed the help in the first place. Who gives a rats ass if someone has made the decision to use a piece of gear that you or I didn't. Whatever makes someone comfortable in the water is the right choice....at least for the time being. After all, most of us are here for the love of scuba diving right??? Or shall people start arguing over that. Once in a while you come across a topic that not only doesn't help but sends the guy into a bigger unknown that when he started....some should be ashamed.

 

[100days-a-year]

THanx HKRacing,sometimes it's nice to have grown-up watching to remind us when we're misbehaving.Also Confucious says"Man with big opinion often hiding deficiencies elsewhere"

 

[HKRacing]

No problem 100 days a year. I am the last person on here to know everything. I come onto scubaboard like most people, to learn things and hear what people have to say but to read a bunch of arguments about their opinions is not helping the people that have questions. I personaly am using the ScubaPro Classis Plus BC.......but that by no means is the perfect or only BC worth diving. Someday, I would like to try the BP and Wings as well as some others but why get thought less of for using a certain type or piece of gear. You use type "A" and I use type "B".....great!!

 

[jplacson]

I recently switched to a BP and wings as well... Seajay helped me lot on this one... but my reasons for considering a BP are a bit different so I'll share my reasons here:

-less side clutter... I hated the jacket pockets cuz they made me feel cramped.

-modularity ... I can customize a BP setup to grow with my needs... or strip it down as needs be. add or remove pockets, d-rings... change bladder sizes... change webbings... etc...

-backplate... I went with aluminum... but I like having a hardpack... jackets have these options as well... but like I said, I don't really like the 'jacket' feeling.. I feel cramped enough in a wetsuit as it is.

-less seams... wings just look sleeker, and I like that... it's purely a cosmetic reason for me. I don't buy into the 'more streamlined' bit since hydro & aero dynamic characteristics of anything usually kick-in only at higher speeds and won't make that big a difference. A BP may make you FEEL faster... but I doubt the difference will be noticable... maybe it'll give you a 1/100 of a second speed increase or something at finning speeds... but our largest drag point is actually the V-space between our tanks & bodies.

-harness is more durable... with the way the boatmen handle gear here in the Philippines, I'd like to know my BC straps won't tear or break while being lifted out of the water...granted jacket straps are strong as well, but they do show more wear on their outer coverings (yes, it's just cosmetic)


If it were possible to dive without a BC, I would... the less gear I have on me, the better... freediving is out for me, cuz I don't wanna just dive for a few seconds before surfacing... but I'd like to get as close to that feeling as possible.

BP/wings feels like wearing a small back-pack underwater for me... it feels like a short hiking trip... jacket BCs feel like... well, wearing a thick jacket while a small back-pack... again, this is just my personal preference, and I don't have anything against jacket BCs... specially when comparing prices! I find BP/wings way over-priced.

 

[paulwlee]

HKRacing once bubbled...
Getting into arguments over this stuff is a joke! It doesn't help anyone and doesn't even answer the question of someone who needed the help in the first place.

Actually, I think it's beneficial as long as it's kept civil.
There are many people with many differing opinions, some right, some wrong, some in the middle. If noone speaks up to disagree with something they read on the board, it may seem that it's an accepted fact, which may be far from the truth.

Having a lively discussion on these things will enable the reader to get (hopefully) all the information and choose what to believe.

Just my 2 cents worth.

 

[-hh]

paulwlee once bubbled...
I'd be very interested in any real comparative studies on this streamlining issue. I for one, don't really feel any difference.

I'm interested too, and generating real data has been a periodic topic of discussion on other scuba forums. For example, I have some professional contacts with the Mechanical Engineering Department at Stevens Institute of Technology (SIT), and I can probably pull some strings to sponsor a Senior Design Project that uses SIT's hydrodynamic drag tank (the water tank where the America's Cup sailboat hulls are tested) to pull some scuba gear through the water and measure drag. I've offered to make the effort if we can have someone loan the gear, because its unreasonable to ask undergrads to drop $500-$1K per set for their test samples. Because its a Student project, it has to be a "one school year" duration type of loan, which is unreasonable to ask a private gear owner to do. In my spare time, I've tried to find loaners, and I do have a few lined up, but the product that's the primary subject of the "mostest streamlined" claims...the Haylcon...is still absent from the test matrix, and without it, its not worth starting.

But then again, maybe that's because I'm in a drysuit that has enough drag that it covers up any advantages the BP/w gives me.

One could make the "every little bit helps" arguement, but pragmatically, its really not worth a $500 investment if it only makes for a 1% gain...at least within the context of recreational diving. What IMO would be of the greatest benefit to the customer and general diving public would be to have the basic data to gage what the percentage differences are, so that they can decide for themselves if they are indeed large enough to be significant or not.

The same applies to split fins, spare airs, and tinted masks. There will always be the Entrepreneur who really has a good new product, if you can get the cold hard test data to separate him from the dozens of charlitans who are offering Snake Oil.



-hh

 

[SeaJay]

...To reply to one of your posts, -hh, but I see something good coming out of this...

-hh once bubbled...


I'm interested too, and generating real data has been a periodic topic of discussion on other scuba forums. For example, I have some professional contacts with the Mechanical Engineering Department at Stevens Institute of Technology (SIT), and I can probably pull some strings to sponsor a Senior Design Project that uses SIT's hydrodynamic drag tank (the water tank where the America's Cup sailboat hulls are tested) to pull some scuba gear through the water and measure drag.

Well, I'm not crazy about traveling to New Jersey (I used to live there), but for the test, I would do so. I would bring with me a Halcyon Pioneer 27 and Gary Hoadley backplate with DIR "continuous" webbing and a Scott Koplin "lightweight" STA.

One thing I would like to make certain, though, is that the testing should not simply be, "throw the gear in the water and drag it." For the test to be realistic, we'd have to put a diver in the tank with the variable gear on and test the hydrodynamics of the whole body.

...But I'd be interested.

In fact, I believe that there are many DIR divers with similar gear configurations in/around New Jersey who wouldn't mind participating in a study like that.

The same applies to split fins, spare airs, and tinted masks. There will always be the Entrepreneur who really has a good new product, if you can get the cold hard test data to separate him from the dozens of charlitans who are offering Snake Oil.

I'm not "attacking" you on this point... I really just want to know... Do you really put bp/wings in the same boat as split fins, spare airs, and tinted masks? I'm not even sure if that's what you're implying, but if you are... Well... Perhaps that's the crux of the differences that you and I have found between us. Bp/wings, I would consider the antithesis of split fins, spare airs and tinted masks. Where those three are "new" and "cool" and "untested," the bp/wing is actually an old design... Sort of a classic. It's not "new" or "untested." It does not hold "promise" of "new technology" and does not offer solutions to problems that don't really exist. It's not a "better mousetrap" as the other three claim to be... It's the opposite of that.

 

[paulwlee]

SeaJay once bubbled...
Where those three are "new" and "cool" and "untested," the bp/wing is actually an old design... Sort of a classic. It's not "new" or "untested." It does not hold "promise" of "new technology" and does not offer solutions to problems that don't really exist. It's not a "better mousetrap" as the other three claim to be... It's the opposite of that.

Hi Seajay,

It seems to me that in the context of recreational diving they are similar. The backplate-harness-wings seems to be the best solution for diving doubles and hanging two AL80 stage bottles etc, and this is where they are 'proven'.
But in single tank recreational diving, the claim that they bring many benefits over conventionally used (and thus widely tested) BC's makes it similar to the claim that split fins are better, etc.

Just my 2 cents' worth.

 

[SeaJay]

Never really looked at it that way.

I suppose, then, that in that light the bp/wing IS the "new and improved better mousetrap."

Okay, then... I see the correlation.

I'd love to do the study. It'd really be interesting information to have.

 

[-hh]

paulwlee once bubbled...

It seems to me that in the context of recreational diving they are similar. The backplate-harness-wings seems to be the best solution for diving doubles and hanging two AL80 stage bottles etc, and this is where they are 'proven'.
But in single tank recreational diving, the claim that they bring many benefits over conventionally used (and thus widely tested) BC's makes it similar to the claim that split fins are better, etc.

Just my 2 cents' worth.

Just back from 2 weeks of diving...

Yes, this is basically my point. If I had to refine it further, I'd say that it consists of two basic elements:

The first element is to what degree any benefit is Real. Most Engineers will tell you that if you can't measure it, it doesn't exist, and if you don't have objective performance data, all you have is an opinion.

When I've commented on "Snake Oil" products, its because these marketeers either don't have any data whatsoever, or the data that they have is invalid because it is profoundly flawed (specific examples upon request).

The problem here with BP/Wings is that nobody has the objective engineering data to prove it...at best, we have anecdotal experience. This doesn't mean that the claim is wrong: its simply unquantified.

BTW, I do agree that dragging a set of gear alone through the water is the wrong test: you need to test the gear's streamlining with it configured onto a "person".


The second element is even if the benefit is real, we need to test it further: is it also significant?

(Edit: this is the "so what?" factor: a changel not of sufficient significance is not worth the effort of its adoption).

As this applies here, what may be significant enough to justify it for technical diving may not necessarily still be significant when applied to recreational diving.


For an analogy, a good comparison to dive gear streamlining might be a car's fuel efficiency (MPG). Good fuel economy is definitely important under some circumstances (such as some NASCAR races), but for most of us, we don't get excited if we found a way to get 27.5mpg instead of 27.0mpg(*), if we track our automobile's MPG at all. Because gas is cheap and there's usually a gas station every ~25 miles, we would tend to say that for "average drivers" such a small difference in MPG is not considered significant.

(* - such as through low rolling resistance tires)

BTW, a car's MPG is an interesting analogy because like diving, there are sources of performance variation that aren't strictly the hardware alone. Factors such as the product's "Driver" (habits like jackrabbit starts, junk in trunk) as well as their operating environment (City driving vs. Highway; plains vs. mountains, speeding, etc) can each have a measurable impact on MPG, and these may be greater in magnitude than discrete hardware changes, which would tend to deemphasize the significance of the hardware if through no other means than adding more variance.

- - -

Bringing this back to diving, let's say that improved streamlining from a BC style change works out to, say, a 50psi savings on an AL80 on a single tank dive. This hypothetical 50psi savings on an AL80 is ~2%, which is mathmatically equivalent to one extra minute per hour of bottom time. Or you could reduce your air consumption by this same 2% by choosing to dive at a depth of 58fsw instead of 60fsw.

Based on this hypothetical example value, the follow-on question is then: is that significant enough to be worth pursuing?

For some divers, this difference is going to be significant for their needs. For others, it is not. The answer depends on their diving needs, as well what the "costs" are to capture that gain, what other alternatives and trade-offs can be considered, and also if it is really a "need" (versus a desirous "want").

Sure, we all want more available Bottom Time, but every time we come up with more than 500psi (proverbially) is firsthand proof that there was some other factor that was ultimately more important.


-hh