I'd be willing to try one, but i'm still not sure about it inside a tail. Especially in a fabric tail. It looks fine from above, but you can bet light will shine through and show that single slender piece between the foot pocket and the fin from under.
~Merman Rett Of Georgia~
(Formerly Known as Risingmermaid)
I bet that could be padded pretty easily.Originally Posted by RisingMermaid
The "peduncle" of the Lunocet is double-hinged and replicates the unique "ball-vertebrae" of a dolphin and replicates the swimming action of many Cetaceans.
It is a vertebrae with a large rubber spring to provide resistance and return it back to centre. This hinged mechanism is unique to the Lunocet.
Normally when I dive, I'm the deepest living thing, so not many ppl see me from below... Unless I'm breathing up on the surface.
A Dolphins tail is actually quite narrow before the flukes and MANY fish are as well (although rotated 90*).
I think the question is... Are mermaids fish or mammals / gills or lungs / up and down, or side-to-side!?
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There have actually been Mers on here whose tails are shaped and colored like dolphins, killer whales etc. I think most prefer the more impossible combination of fish and human because of the exotic nature of it. The myriad colors, fin shapes, scale patterns, shimmer, sparkle, stripes etc. make for more magical options. I personally, like the thought of only having to surface if you want to rather than have to.
Ha, this thread is a roller coaster. So much going on. About the lunocet, I think many people in this community, myself included have fantasized about how a lunocet could be integrated into a tail. I was so into the idea that a couple years ago I even tried to reverse engineer a poor man's version, although my attempt was unsurprisingly a failure. But if you or someone else here could figure out how to do it, man, that would be the coolest.
The lunocet intersects with another topic in this thread- the relationship between mermaiding and freediving. While for some people mermaiding is almost entirely about performing and aesthetics, I'm in the camp where swimming as a merman is about fulfilling a fantasy, and that definitely includes anything that can extend my down time and make me feel like an aquatic creature, not just look like one. So what you've been saying is possibly more relevant for people like me.
About the neck weights, I'm pretty neutral (no pun intended). I've never heard of them but I believe you when you say they're a real thing. I don't totally get it since I feel like having weights at the waist makes the most sense since it's close to your center of mass. Also 5-7 lbs seems like a lot. I wear 12 lbs when I dive with my 7mm wetsuit. Also, I think silicone tails are negatively buoyant. I'd be willing to try a little weight on my neck, but I'd probably start with 1 or 2 lbs and see what I think.
Lots of freedivers use neck weights, both for vertical diving on a line, and for dynamic events (swimming horizontally underwater in a pool.)
IME, for recreational freediving in open water, and for spearfishing, a weightbelt is better, but when diving vertically, you've have the issue of a weightbelt falling down around your chest when you're upside-down. The solutions available are to use a rubber belt and stretch it really tight (which interferes with your breathe-up) or attach a strap through your crotch (which increases drag) or use a neck weight.
You can see Niki Roderick wearing a neck weight in this video of a vertical line dive that Echidna posted previously.
You can see it hanging on her chin as she descends. This is one of the more annoying things about neck weights IME.
For dynamic it's important to be able to stay effortlessly aligned in the water. Many freedivers who tend to float heads higher in the water find a neck weight helps them stay aligned horizontally. Divers who float horizontally naturally do better with a weight belt. I have one buddy who needs a lot of weight so she uses both a weight belt and a neck weight to stay aligned.
One of the instructors at the Toronto Freediving club has published a webpage on how to make your own neck weight
http://enjoyfreediving.com/2011/03/0...g-neck-weight/
IME though, the majority of mermaids & mermen have the opposite problem to freedivers. Most I've seen swim with their tail higher than their heads, and a neck weight will only make this worse. I'm speculating that this might be from small amounts of air trapped in the tail? Cricket from Otter Bay Wetsuits makes a monofin with attached weights to help balance people wearing their mermaid suit out, but I think this is a bad idea. Fins move all the time, and heavy ones will just tire you out. Also, they are impossible to ditch in an emergency. This would also be true of ankle weights inside a tail. I think a weight belt seated low on the hips might be the way to go.
This video of the Cirque du Soleil sychro team performing in the film Journey of Man shows a solution the costume designers came up with for a weight belt that looks cool and fits in with their costume theme, instead of looking "weight-belt'y". It is also very fast to ditch because it is attached with velcro.
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