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BattlingBeasts — Alex Rivers wingsuit sketches

#action #actionadventure #adventure #alex #cretaceous #dinosaurs #evolution #evolved #extreme #rivers #sports #suit #technology #wing #wingsuit #latecretaceous
Published: 2014-11-24 04:24:05 +0000 UTC; Views: 2583; Favourites: 10; Downloads: 0
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Description     Alex Rivers is the team paleontologist and a part-time dare devil. He grew up in the rural Midwest and became a close friend of Dawn's in high school after visiting France as a foreign exchange student. He's always very excitable, upbeat, and at times extremely reckless; which makes it easy to forget  that he's extremely intelligent and one of the world authorities on paleozoology and paleoethology. His reckless behavior has gotten him into trouble in the past as he broke his back in a proximity wingsuit flight in South Africa. He also lost his left leg in the same accident, as well as his other leg, left forearm, and the entirety of his right arm and part of his shoulder in a dinosaur attack two years later. Oddly enough these accidents never made him anymore cautious. A majority of the time he'll get up after a big fall or tumble as if he were made of rubber. 
    At times he can also be very philosophical. He's an atheist but strongly believes that "Everyone has to believe in or value something in life,". His views have something in common with Dawn's stone-age faith in that all life that exists and has existed represents a unified whole though every individual has its own awareness.

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    One of Al's defining characteristics is that he's a prominent wingsuit flier. The picture one the upper left was my original design for his wingsuit, which was partially based on pterosaur wing design. One of the main rules that the W.E.S. team has is to cause as little interference as possible in the past to avoid causing a paradoxes. They treat time-travel in a similar manner to space exploration and thus wear self contained suits to keep modern microbes from contaminating the prehistoric environment and vise versa.
    As time went on I thought that maybe Al's suit could've been modified for flight, rather than carrying the the suit or the wing apparatus in a pack, which was my original idea. So I made his helmet a little more stretched out or pointed, giving it a vague resemblance to a crested pteranodon. Likewise his boots/prosthetic legs have a specialized launching mechanism where fiberglass blades flip out of the front of each boot at a high enough speed that he get's launched skyward. His arms are also modified to allow him to use powered flight to remain aloft. Something today's wingsuit fliers can't do.
    His wings were a bit more tricky. At first he was supposed to have handles which he held onto, but that didn't allow for the aerodynamic look I wanted. Eventually I decided that his wings, like his suit were made from a type of smart fabric or e-textile which could unfold and act very much like the muscle membrane of the wings of a large pterosaurs in flight. Once unfolded they would be strapped on over his forearm and hand (with exception of his thumb). To activate it he would simply press a button on his palm with his exposed thumb to fully activate the wing and jump.
    
    The two drawings on the right represent the current wingsuit design. The one on top is a quick concept sketch while the one on the bottom portray's a scene from the first book where Al gets his arm shot off in mid-flight by poachers who threaten to change the future as a result of their illegal activities. After this Alex manages to escape to tell the rest of the crew, but Dawn ends up fall off his back and getting captured.

If you managed to read all this and not get a head-ache, good on ya!   
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Comments: 1

DarthWill3 [2017-02-04 19:05:02 +0000 UTC]

Most impressive...

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