Status
The road to launch — in the open.
No feed, no algorithm, no posting quota. Just a running log of what I’m building, and the thinking behind it. Stop by whenever you’re curious, but this page will be gone on launch day.
Short version: BASE-Bf is in the final stretch. Launch was planned for Spring of 26′ build season in the Northern Hemisphere, but we are deep into Summer as there’s been a delay I didn’t plan for. I’ve used it to make the tool better, not just later.
What it is
BASE-Bf — Before Assessment Simulation Engine for Bike features
The tool you reach for first — to design and understand a jump, drop, or roller before you move dirt, and before the formal sign-offs. It runs the physics so you walk in knowing what your numbers mean. Call it computational education: the math, in your hands, to learn from.
What it does:
- Physics-based design for jumps, drops, and rollers — takeoff, flight, landing, impact, the whole arc
- Flight solved with real aerodynamic drag, not the drag-free “cannonball” arc — a small correction at trail speeds that grows as you go faster, plus a wind envelope to show you when wind actually matters (and when it doesn’t)
- Chaining for gravity-fed lines
- Clean PDF build sheets, plus DXF and CSV, to take from screen to dirt
📖 A full user guide — roughly 70 pages, with cited sources and educational content alongside the app how-to — ships with every version. The guide alone is worth the price of admission, it’s way beyond anything I ever published at Trailism.
What it’ll cost
Straight answer, no “contact us for pricing.” A free tier to start, and paid tiers that unlock more of the toolbox — you pay for features — the software kind — not a subscription.
| Tier | Price | What you get | When |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Jumps — on screen | At launch |
| Paid | $150 | + drops, rollers, chaining · PDF + CSV + DXF exports | At launch |
| Paid | $300 | + survey / GNSS world-coordinate export | After field testing |
| Paid | $600 | + simulate existing features | After field testing |
Indicative — final numbers lock at launch. Free and the $150 tier are ready at launch; the upper tiers follow after field validation. No date promised; I’d rather get it right than get it out.
How you’ll get it
No secret link, no “reply to claim your spot.” When it’s ready, the download goes live on the main BASE-Bf page — and everyone on the list gets one email the moment it does. Bookmark that page, or drop your email below; either way you’re covered.
Want a heads-up so you’re not checking back? Send me an email and I’ll add you to the launch list. The day it goes live, you get one note — that’s the only thing your address is used for. No newsletter, no spam, and the list is deleted after launch.
Opens your email app, pre-addressed — just hit send. One email, one time, at launch.
Already got my launch update in your inbox? Then you’re set — you’re on the list, nothing to do.
Updates
June 2026 — What the extra time went into.
The delay was nothing dramatic. The longer story of how it got here goes back a while:
BASE-Bf didn’t start as software. The core math began in 2016 — a spreadsheet model I worked out by hand, alongside a lot of reading in the ski-jump-safety and cycling-injury research. But I’m not a programmer, and turning that math into real software was a wall I couldn’t get over on my own — Python especially. So it sat, mostly stalled, for years: I knew what I needed, I just couldn’t build it.
What finally changed is that the tools caught up — modern software tooling made it buildable for someone who isn’t a coder. But I built it the slow, disciplined way, not a one-shot anything: iterative and hands-on, with plenty of misunderstandings to work back from. It’s specification-first — every module written against a written contract, under house rules I don’t break: no magic numbers (every constant cites a peer-reviewed source or a recorded decision) and fail closed (no silent fallbacks; if something’s wrong, it stops and says so). Every algorithm and number traces to a contract and a citation, every result is deterministic and reproducible, and more than 850 automated tests check both the working and failure paths at every boundary. Four intensive months, 267 versioned commits — 66 of them dedicated to fixing bugs I’d rather you never meet.
The point isn’t who or what typed the code. It’s that the correctness rests on the math and the citations — things you can check — not on the authorship. That’s why it took a while. I’d rather it be right.
April 2026 — Preparing for the PTBA Conference in Idaho really pushed me to put in some long hours getting ready for the conference, and also the launch of BASE-Bf. I was shooting for a May 1st release, but the conference and “business matters” many new businesses struggle with squashed my soft “spring release” hopes.
Trailism was one of the first dedicated bike jump calculator and education stops on the web. And like some of the copy-cat jump math you’ll find online now, it treated a rider in the air like a cannonball: a pure ballistic arc, gravity only. It’s clean, it’s the high-school equation — and at mellow trail speeds it’s a fine approximation. But air pushes back, and the push grows with the square of speed: a rounding error on a slow jump, a real effect on a fast or big feature, and bigger still into a stiff wind.
BASE-Bf doesn’t use the cannonball equation. It solves the actual equation of motion — gravity and aerodynamic drag — step by step through the whole flight. Drag scales with your frontal area (estimated from rider height) and the air’s density — and your total weight (rider, bike, and gear) sets how much that drag actually slows you. Air density follows altitude: thinner air up high, denser at sea level. The trajectory you get reflects what the air does to you, not an idealization that ignores it.
Why it matters on the dirt: the landing surface is built backward from where you actually come down — not from where a drag-free arc says you should. Any error in the flight carries downstream — distance, landing angle, impact — so it’s worth solving properly instead of approximating. That’s the whole idea: do the real computations, show the work, and let you see how every number was reached.
December 2025 — Starting the build, in the open.
The math’s been around since 2016 — but it lived in an Excel spreadsheet and a rudimentary HTML calculator: the right numbers, never the real tool. Turning it into software was a different mountain. I went through several versions, each one almost built and then rebuilt, learning a whole new way to work and taking the hard lessons as they came — and then the one that stuck. This spring it began in earnest — jumps first, then drops and rollers. I’ll log the road here as it comes together. Ten years in the making, and it feels good to finally be at the precipice of a dream realized. I was thinking of traveling south to work during my off-season, but decided to bear down with my computer and do what I have wanted to do for a decade.