true, although the length is also exaggerated by the wide-angle lens.
But yeah, his bar is designed to maximize counter-steer (leverage) while cranking over rocks and roots.
This guy is riding a suspended MTB (witness the constant pedal-bob absorbing his legs’ output with every rev he cranks) on the flattest Midwestern terrain above ground, and then even flatter below ground.
It’s kind of a meme at this point for cyclists to criticize other cyclist’s build choices online, but for real, this guy could easily be going half-again as fast for the same output (or the same speed for way less output) if he’d use the type of bike optimized for the riding he does i.e. any post-1986 road bike.
2 Likes
Right. Same thing for stop signs in front of stores,
Heck, anything designed for road use since the diamond-frame safety bike and the pneumatic tire became widespread c. 1890 would be fine. It’s not like you need multiple gears or a lightweight frame to go fast in a straight line on flat ground - you just need a bike that’s not literally absorbing all your effort and converting it into waste heat 
Looking at the guy’s other videos, though, he does have a fancy modern road bike. So maybe he was planning on riding some trails after work ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
1 Like
I think some of the road fast-forwarded through at 1:45 might affect his choice. It looks pretty cracked up and I’ve knackered wheels on holes before now.
2 Likes
You could have fun in that place with a little carefully applied paint.
eta: The place could use some taggers to liven up the monotonous color scheme.
1 Like
This reminds me of the relatively nearby Kansas City Subtropolis, which was similarly converted for warehouse and light industry use. These places always intrigue me, not only for being awesome underground spaces but because they offer the best analogs on Earth for what actual space settlements are most-likely to be like. I’ve long wanted to use them for a kind of home & garden show of the future where people could experiment with their own ideas about living in subterranean space settlements.
Space/SciFi media is always implausibly depicting space settlement as either high-tech Airstreams in the desert or Levittown-Under-Glass. But, realistically, actual settlement has to make the most of minimally processed local materials and the use of robotics --no one is building much by hand out there. Excavations outfit by retrofit is one of the most straightforward approaches to in-situ resource utilization for habitat construction. It doesn’t demand extreme precision or sophistication from your robots and if you can achieve the kinds of spans you see in these places on Earth, imagine how much larger those spans could be on the Moon and Mars. Real settlements need lots of room to grow --literally. You’re not sustainably living out there with a tin can army base with a few pop-up plug-in greenhouses --and who could ever call an army base home? The village or town whole is the likely minimum settlement scale (think of the Circus in Bath or the Nahal moshev, all underground) with farming/gardening the primary activity, providing food, industrial products (plants are an at-hand nanotechnology), supporting atmosphere, and helping create an aesthetically pleasing habitat. So it’s underground places like these that probably offer a more plausible impression of life in space than anything NASA or SciFi typically show us.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
