What Is Drop?
Drop is a jump. You leave an aircraft at seven hundred metres with a parachute you have not opened yet, and somewhere downwind of you there is a landing pad eighteen metres across. Between the door and the pad there is nothing but air, a wind of somewhere between four and eight metres a second, and one decision.
You fall in two stages. At first you are in freefall, belly to earth, dropping at fifty-eight metres a second with your arms out and a surprising amount of control over where you are going. Then you open, and everything changes: the descent slows to eight metres a second, the wing answers your hands about six times less sharply, and the wind that was a background nuisance while you were falling becomes the thing flying you.
The score has two parts. You are paid for the ground you covered, which rewards a long ride, and then you are paid a bonus for where you put it down, which rewards stopping. A dead-centre landing is worth five hundred points on top of the distance. Anything past forty-five metres off is worth nothing at all, no matter how far you travelled to get there.
How to Play
- Press the button and you are out. You start at seven hundred metres with the aircraft's forward speed carrying you, and the pad is two hundred and fifty metres downwind.
- Fall. Do not open straight away. Freefall is where you have real authority over your position, and it is the only phase where you can make a big correction cheaply.
- Steer with the left and right keys. The wind is pushing you downwind the whole time, and in freefall you can fly against it hard enough to beat almost anything the weather throws at you.
- Watch the height. The readout on the right of the bar is your altitude, and the tape on the stage shows the same thing as a column. The thin line across that tape is where your last canopy opened, which is the most useful number on the screen.
- Open with Space, or the button at the bottom of the stage. There is no penalty for opening and no reward for waiting longer than you needed to, but once it is open you cannot go back to falling.
- Fly the canopy to the pad. You have far less authority now and the wind has far more, so this is a phase of small corrections made early rather than big ones made late.
- Land. Anything under nine and a half metres a second is a landing and anything over it is an arrival, and the difference between the two is entirely which phase you were in when the ground came up.
- Read the score, then jump again. The wind is different on every jump.
The wind is re-rolled every time, between four and a half and seven and a half metres a second. That is a small range and it matters a great deal, because a canopy can only hold against five and a half metres of it. Some jumps you can fly to the pad and some jumps the pad comes to you, and the only way to tell which is to look at how fast the ground is sliding past underneath.
The Decisions That Actually Matter
There are only four of these, and three of them are made before the canopy is open. The rest of the jump is execution.
- When to open
- This is the whole game. Opening at five hundred and twenty metres in a six metre wind carries you three hundred and eighty-eight metres downwind. Opening at three hundred and forty puts you at two hundred and fifty-three, which is the pad. Opening at one hundred and sixty leaves you at a hundred and eighteen, well short. The same jump, the same wind, the same nothing-else-changed, and a two-hundred-and-seventy-metre spread decided by one button press.
- How long to keep falling
- Freefall is not dead time. It is the only part of the jump where you can genuinely fly, and a long fall is how you fix a bad exit. The catch is that it is also the part where the ground arrives fast, so the height you spend correcting is height you cannot spend under canopy.
- Which way to point in freefall
- The wind is taking you downwind whether you like it or not, and while you are falling you can out-fly it. Pointing upwind in freefall buys you back the metres that the canopy is about to give away, and it is almost always worth doing even though it feels like fighting the weather.
- When to stop steering
- Under canopy, every correction you make takes about two thirds of a second to arrive and then saturates. There is a speed the wing will not exceed sideways, and holding the key past that point does nothing except make the eventual correction harder to judge. Fly in short inputs and watch what the ground does.
Why the Canopy Changes Everything
The reason this game has two phases is not variety. It is that a falling body and an open canopy are genuinely governed by different physics, and the difference is not a matter of degree.
In freefall you are small, heavy and going straight down very fast. The air is a real force on you, but your downward momentum is enormous, so when the wind changes you take about three seconds to notice: after three seconds in a six metre wind you are only travelling at three point nine metres a second, about two thirds of the way to matching it. That lag is what gives you authority. Because the air is not carrying you yet, steering input is steering relative to the ground, and you can fly upwind at thirty-seven metres a second, which beats any wind this game will ever give you.
Under a canopy, the arithmetic inverts. The wing is large and light and it is fully part of the air mass within about two thirds of a second, so the wind is no longer something you can outrun. It is the medium you are moving in. Your steering authority settles at five point four metres a second, and there is nothing you can do to make it more.
That gives the game one hard rule, and it is the rule the whole design is built around. A canopy can hold against five and a half metres of wind. Put it in a fourteen metre wind and pull as hard as you like upwind and it still slides downwind at eight and a half metres a second, because the wing has nine metres per second squared of authority and sixteen tenths of coupling, and nine divided by one point six is five point six. That is the ceiling. In freefall, against the same fourteen metre wind, you fly upwind at forty-six.
So the game is not about aim
Most targeting games are about precision. This one is about timing, and the difference is worth being clear about, because it changes how you should be practising.
If your canopy can only correct five and a half metres a second, then over a canopy ride of forty seconds you have a theoretical two hundred metres of lateral adjustment, which sounds like plenty until you notice that the wind is doing the same thing to you at the same time. You are not steering to a target. You are choosing a height at which the wind will deliver you, and then making small corrections on the way down.
The measured numbers make this concrete. Hands off, no steering at all, the same jump lands at three hundred and eighty-eight metres, two hundred and fifty-three metres or one hundred and eighteen metres depending only on whether the canopy opened at five hundred and twenty, three hundred and forty or one hundred and sixty. Those three openings cover a spread of two hundred and seventy metres with the controls untouched.
Which is why the useful skill to practise is not flying accuracy. It is reading the drift. Watch the ground slide past under you in the first few seconds of canopy flight and work out how fast it is going, because that number tells you whether the height you chose was right while there is still time to do something about it. Getting that read wrong is the most common way to lose a jump, and it is a reading error rather than a flying one.
The landing, and why nine and a half
The game checks one number at the moment you meet the ground: whether you were doing more than nine and a half metres a second when you got there. Over that, the jump is over and the landing bonus is gone. Under it, you are standing up and the bonus is yours.
An open canopy comes down at eight metres a second, so a canopy arrival is always a landing, with a metre and a half to spare. Freefall arrives at fifty-eight, which is six times the limit and not a close call in any sense. There is no gradual scale here and no partial credit: the check is not asking how good your landing was, it is asking whether you had a canopy at all.
That is a blunt rule and it is deliberately blunt, because the alternative would be worse. A game that gave you partial credit for a fast arrival would be telling you that a seventy-kilometre-an-hour arrival is a bad landing rather than a fatal one, and the entire tension of the jump comes from the fact that opening late is not risky in a statistical sense. It is simply the wrong answer, every time, with no grey area for the game to be clever in.
Jumping From a Phone
A jump takes somewhere between thirteen seconds and a minute and a half depending on how long you fall, and the decision it turns on is a single button press that you can take at any point in the first twelve seconds. That makes it a good fit for a phone, where you are usually holding the thing one-handed and looking at it from an angle.
On a keyboard the arrow keys and A and D both steer, and Space opens the canopy. The deploy button appears at the bottom of the stage as soon as you are out of the aircraft, so it is where your thumb already is rather than somewhere you have to reach for.
On a touchscreen, hold the left or right half of the stage to steer and tap the deploy button when you want the canopy. The steer is not a direction you point at, it is a push you keep applying, so your thumb stays down for the whole correction and comes off when the ground has stopped sliding sideways. That suits a wind that never lets up: you are holding a position against something, not steering towards something.
The altitude tape on the right of the stage is the thing to watch on a small screen. It is read at a glance rather than studied, and it carries the mark showing where your last canopy opened, so you can compare this jump against the one before it without holding two numbers in your head.