There was only the plume of smoke the first day - http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-11/industrial-fire-sends-thick-smoke-across-melbourne/7080002

Somehow I managed to miss it, despite my office having almost the same view of the city that the thumbnail of that video has, and despite living 1.5kms from the fire! In my defence though there is terrain in the way. It is a 10 minute and 5 km drive, but that's because there is no direct road... have a look at the map, https://goo.gl/maps/PxVBFJWaLA92 and the problem is the western ring road, 400m to the south of the fire.

i remember reading ages ago that they did experiments that showed that cats that walked along uneven walls could 'see' the terrain without their eyes being involved. It must be the ankle tapping whiskers!

Just my opinion, but it depends on what we all mean by "real" fight. There's two ways about it. Either in some kind of ring (i.e. small boundaries) or open terrain (no boundaries).

With boundaries big guys can catch hold of a smaller guy and use their weight and strength (so we need weight classes). Without boundaries there's nothing to stop small guys out running and chipping a bigger guy down over hours/days if necessary sapping their energy. Without the boundary of the room, Connor wouldn't have been caught. That's what i meant by a "real" fight (i.e. to the death), which i think Connor would win.

Well done, executed and shot!
IMHO it would have looked cooler if he had shown his awesome skills on untouched terrain instead of the mountainside carving that took place.

Because of the terrain, and the fact that it's out in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, go-arounds are quite common too:

Yes, that would be brilliant.
However, also true that in terrain that difficult and ridged, I bet there would be all sorts of line of sight issues that get resolved by having an airborne platform.

Going forward, I'd say: Drone.

Looks like they took a clue from the Nissan Skylines ATTESA E-TS Pro system. (Advanced Total Traction Engineering System for All-Terrain - Electronic Torque Split )

So as a relative newcomer* to the backcountry, here's my $0.02:

They were incredibly lucky.

Going into a gully like that after a snow storm is a "terrain trap" where even a small slide can accumulate very deep snow. Getting buried under 2-3m is bad, but 10m+? Unless you have the world snow shoveling champion team in your party, you're dead.

Good on them for carrying shovels and probes, but where were their transceivers? The article states that the victim had his transceiver with him but the others didn't. A single transceiver is about as useful as a prick in a nunnery.

The only reason that guy is alive is he managed to stick his ski pole above the snow. Without that, by the time they find him, they're not rescuing him, they're recovering the body.

Most importantly, they knew it was a sketchy line and they went anyway (and altogether.... jesus.... spread the fuck out... no-one gonna rescue you if you're all buried).

Right there, that's the fatal mistake. I know guys who have hiked for 6 hours to get to a run, looked at it and turned back. If you're not sure, don't go. Even if it means climbing back out.

So to sum up:
unsure about conditions: don't go
the entire party doesn't have a shovel/probe/transceiver each: don't go
if you absolutely have to go: one at a time and aim for a safe spot

/sermon

I'm being a bit of a prick on this. It's really easy to criticise, but I've been there and I know that powder fever takes hold. But *nature hates you and wants to kill you. Keep that in mind.

* I've been side-country riding for a few years, but started splitboarding last year.

A camera rig attached to a Porsche Cayenne...

He definitely changed from slicks (in the bobsled run) to all-terrain tires (on the ski jump.

...can't get over how he's riding in areas that would be damn difficult to hike, let alone ride.

Awfully beautiful terrain to be staring at the few feet in front of you the entire time though.

Is it sad I can tell those are BFGoodrich All-Terrain T/As just from the tread pattern?

Legs would give it better traction and all-terrain mobility in theory. It's a cool bit of engineering, but I'm guessing that it can't stop or slow down without falling over, which would limit its practicality.

It might be the start of a very good idea though. I don't really know much about it, but it seems to me that the difficult part of normal legs is getting them back into position for another stride while maintaining balance and the wheel mounted legs almost do that automatically.

Still have a few questions about this, what if you build like 20 miles of this, and theres a faultline or heat causing two 10-mile halves to separate like 10 cm?, do you upend and move one half after the other?, or do you patch it in with cables and concrete? You might say earthquakes are rare, but even a change in heat can cause the road to expand. I have seen this first hand, I once worked on a bridgeproject on a 5km long bridge, and the edges moves quite a lot due to changes in temperature making the bridge expand or contract.

Im sure this modular concept works fine for building a porch, but making thousands of miles of road under all kinds of conditions, terrain etc is a whole new bag of problems.

I also worked in an office building once, that had these kinds of modular tiles for floors, buildt on stilts, so that you could stretch cables under there (the kind used in server-rooms) again, these things are fine for small server rooms/ilses etc, but when applied to large open office landscapes, they caused all kinds of havok and problems (they became wobbly, uneven, gaps formed etc.) And this was inside, in a brand new building, about as controlled an environment as you can get.

I would love to see these things becoming reality, but highly skeptical that its even doable.

TBH they just play catchup to Crytek. IMO the Sandbox Editor of Cryengine has been second to none re: Terrain Modelling/Editing for years.

:-O
The terrain editor ... wow