2983: Monocaster

|< < Prev Comic #2983 (September 9, 2024) Next > >|

Monocaster

Title text: My competitors say the tiny single tiny caster is unsafe, unstable, and offers no advantages over traditional designs, to which I say: wow, why are you guys so mean? I thought we were friends!

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a LAPTOP-CONTROLLED HAMSTER BALL - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

A caster, also spelled castor, is a small unpowered wheel attached to a swiveling base. They are typically found on carts and heavy appliances that need to be pushed around by people on a regular basis.

Randall has proposed a variant of the skateboard with only one caster on the bottom, the titular "monocaster." He claims this fills an untapped hole in the market, which is filled with plenty of vehicles with one large wheel like unicycles, or multiple small wheels like roller skates, but none with only a single small wheel.

The joke depends on the caster's obvious impractically in this role: the hole in the market was open for a reason. A single caster is effectively useless, forcing all the weight of a person on a single swiveling point. The rider has no way to propel themselves besides pushing off the ground, and will almost certainly lose their balance immediately upon trying. The other designs on the market were all designed specifically to solve this problem: the unicycle's larger wheel and pedal drive make balancing in motion much less dangerous, while multi-wheeled vehicles give more points of contact with the ground.

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

[A chart picturing many wheeled vehicles. The vertical axis is labeled "Wheel Diameter", logarithmic from 1cm to 5m. The horizontal axis is labeled "Number of wheels", logarithmic from 1 to 16. From top left to bottom right, there is a person with a cap, seated in a circle, labeled "1920s monowheel", a monster truck with a skull and a lightning bolt on the side, a lorry (truck), a Cueball on a unicycle moving back and forth, a Cueball on a bicycle, a car, a Cueball using a Onewheel, a Cueball on a tricycle, a Cueball on a quad, a Cueball standing on a scooter, a Cueball standing on a board with one small wheel bellow, circled and labeled with two question marks, a three-wheel scooter, a skater, a Cueball using three-wheel skates, labeled "three-wheel skates", a Cueball crouching and using skates, and a small Cueball using shoes with wheels (Heelys) moving forward.]

My new monocaster board fills a key gap in the wheeled vehicle market.

 add a comment! ⋅  add a topic (use sparingly)! ⋅  refresh comments!

Discussion

Unicycles aren't (or at least aren't usually) chain-driven. I might try to fix that if my phone stops being so slow that it feels like I'm using a 90s PC to do this. Maybe a restart will help. Rebooting in 10, 9, 8... 172.70.91.76 07:46, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

I just went in and Actual Citation Needed it (seeing lower comment, when editor reloaded this page for me, forcing me to rewrite, that may have changed now).

• It doesn't look like a chain-drive. Could be hub-geared, but not the same thing.
• Chain-drive to raise the rider (most of the mass) up higher will raise the CoG.
• 'Underslung' chain-drive (see 1880s example, here?) has problems. Pedals hitting the ground would be one of them, unless your wheel was indeed significantly larger...
• ...and if it is (perhaps for better off-roading?), this intrinsically pushes up the CoG. Perhaps you are trying to lower it slightly, again, then. But you can't bring the saddle (and crotch!) lower than the now higher top of the wheel. ("Timeline of Bicycles" version excepted, assumed assymetric? In some manner?)

Add to that a few niggles about the bicycle. Not sure if intended to be a Moulton-style one (wheels maybe the classic 17", frame totally wrong) or a roadbike-style-ish one (frame relatively Ok, as drawn by someone not fully adhering to the design, maybe confused by some MTB variations, but clearly not in the ~27" wheel range, give or take). Of course, wheels are neither concentric nor circular, so depends a bit on which bits of the 'circles' are right for the intended arc and which bits ended up more casually doodled. 172.70.91.99 08:51, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

There also don't appear to be any pedals on the bicycle, with the rider instead resting their feet on the bottom bracket. Which is... unorthodox.141.101.99.135 11:16, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Charitably, the nearside foot (and leg) is positioned at the top-going crank position, with the farside one stretched down to the down-angled crank/pedal, but the chainring is a solid disc (and a radius to match the crank-lengths), rather than the usual "with many cutout bits" and a few inches smaller in radius than the pedal-extents.

Though the fact you can see the frame (the downtube, seat-tube and at least one of the chainstays) where they meet at the bottom-bracket means that the disc-chainring is mounted with the left pedal+crank (the lowered one), rather than on the side of the RHS pedal+crank (the one raised), as per usual. But that's hardly the weirdest bit about the depiction. ;) 141.101.99.88 14:59, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

AFAIK, unicycles aren't GENERALLY chain-driven, but tall ones are (to put the peddles where the rider can reach them, but raise the rider up, often to a second story of a building). That said, I don't see a chain here, but I also don't see one in the description, so obviously sorted out by now. NiceGuy1 (talk) 06:13, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

Hmm, Randall missed an opportunity to put a Penny-Farthing in there... though I'm not sure how that would have categorised given that it has two wheels of different sizes. --172.68.205.178 08:19, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

He has a "Big Wheel Trike" (child's low-rider style thing) in there. On the logarithmic scale, and imprecise reference point (bottom/middle(/CoG,where different)/top of wheel/vehicle/rider/whole?), both the big front wheel and the small trailing wheels colpd be in the right place-ish, although having it slightly inclined could put them in the (place Tandall considers to be) exactly right place. ((Note also where the 10(?)-wheeler truck-and-trailer is placed horizontally vs the possibly relevent "number of wheels".))

You could do something similar with the Old Ordinary (i.e. "Penny-Farthing"), either make it roughly right or depict going up a marginally steeper hill. 172.69.194.142 09:04, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

I'd say ignore the small wheel (would crowd with similar-sized wheels) and place according to the front wheel, might be easier to find room there. :) Agreed, missed opportunity, that front wheel is particularly large. Also, when talking about number of wheels and large wheels, how could he miss the BelAZ_75710? A lot of people have been introduced to the concept, 2 wheels per corner I think and I think the wheels are like 8 feet tall in diameter! (I guess like 2.5 meters or so, I'm just pretty sure it's well over my own height of 6'2", which I know is around 190cm or nearly 2m). NiceGuy1 (talk) 06:42, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

Re: unicycles, the COG thing doesn't look right either, but I was distracted by a (thankfully) now-deleted troll comment before and actually fixing the description is beyond my skills, especially on so little sleep.172.69.43.184 08:35, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

i had good intentions, we need to call randall out --172.69.194.122 09:44, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

If you mean your calling out the other point, that has been deleted anyway: Randall doesn't read this site (that we know; and, if I had a site such as this made for my works, I'd think it wisest to stay clear), so he probably won't get your 'message'. This particular comic doesn't even have the slightest connection to that subject, so not even the page to say anything about it. And the point made (even if it was a valid one... it presupposes that there are no nuances and compromises, that one cannot have a complex set of opinions that neither wholly match nor wholly mismatch your opinions) was also absurd, when you consider how the other party involved has proven to be even more so. I won't dignify this issue further by putting names and places here, it really isn't the forum for it. But please realise (if you don't already) that your irrelevent point is out of place here. And most places on this site that you/others like you may have tried such messaging on before. Go to /pol/, or your favourite forum's dedicated boards/threads. Ok? 172.70.85.19 12:26, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

Call him out for *what* exactly? 172.68.70.135 12:05, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

As I dare to hint, just above, someone thinks Randall has a wrong personal opinion on some current issue. Which has nothing to do with this comic. 172.70.85.19 12:26, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

You can check the history of this Talk section like I just did, some weirdo wrote a wild rant about Randall's politics (seems out of left field and based on nothing) which had nothing to do with the comic beyond ranting about Randall and Randall being the author. It was the original first comment. Most proper deletion, I say. NiceGuy1 (talk) 06:31, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

Actually, I think the rant came more out of right field, but I agree with the rest of that assessment... ;) 172.71.26.23 13:54, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

actually i support the green party :) 172.69.79.138 07:18, 17 September 2024 (UTC)

As a unicyclist myself, I don't think the unicycle is easier to balance because of a lower center of mass and a chain drive. As a few others have mentioned, they don't normally have a chain drive, although there are a few specialist ones that do. Normally, the cranks are just attached to the hub so you can directly control the speed of the wheel at a 1 to 1 ratio, which makes it easier to balance on. The other thing that would make the unicycle easier than the monocaster is that you can control what direction the wheel is pointing by turning the seat with your thighs. 172.68.186.128 09:22, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

Love the log-log scale. Now let's see the zoomed-out version, with orders of magnitude more wheels and orders of magnitude larger diameters. 172.71.166.230 13:59, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

The scale if off either way. Or Randall wrote centimeters while he meant inches... At least for some cases. Examples: he placed the skatebord at 2cm while skateboord wheels are at ca 5cm - which are approx. 2 inches. Scooter wheels are approx 8.5 inches, not 8.5 cm... The car is mostly fine, albeit it would be a rather small car at ~50cm (a 19 inch (50cm) wheel designates the size of the rims, not the wheel) Elektrizikekswerk (talk) 15:18, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

out of all people i would think Randall would be the last one to use a non-SI unit to measure distance. --Markifi (talk) 17:45, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

He usually prefers SI units, yes. Elektrizikekswerk (talk) 10:03, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

I have NEVER heard anyone call inline skates "three wheel skates". 141.101.109.193 19:04, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

As a quad skater through most of my youth, the depicted "three-wheel skate" was only called "inline" skates. Not sure where this 3-wheel designation came from! RandalSchwartz (talk) 21:59, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

I too thought the term “three-wheel skate” seemed odd, and thought “inline skates” might be more appropriate. Then I remembered that in fact, most inline skates have four wheels… a memory that a quick Google image search seemed to support. So I guess a three-wheel skate is a special case of inline skate, rather than the default implementation. 172.70.160.137 06:56, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

Both variants exist and the three-wheeled version has generally bigger wheels - so the relative depiction of both variants in the diagram is correct. But their position regarding to wheel size is not. See my comment above Elektrizikekswerk (talk) 10:03, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

title text sounds like beret guy ngl--1234231587678 (talk) 23:38, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

Not a single mention of Pollux? Wikipedia 172.68.70.122 11:53, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

Disconcerting that this explanation does not describe any of the vehicles, instead entirely making one-sided arguments regarding the title text. 172.71.175.16 15:53, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

I was considering a tabular list of all subjects, when I had time, at least to the Preview stage. Very brief: 'Vehicle' (wikilinked, as appropriate)/№ of wheels/typical size of wheel(s)/Typical use. No long paragraphs intended. Might need a range in the size column (possibly some in the # of wheels column). If someone gets there before me, though, I wouldn't mind. :p

...and I just discovered that the # 'key', in the numbers 'screen' of this touchscreen keyboard has ”№” as a long-press alternative! How long have I been using this and hadn't realised? (Four years. That's how long.) 172.70.90.137 16:43, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

DougM (talk) 16:35, 11 September 2024 (UTC)Missed opportunity to bring in the Letourneau l2350 loader, which I think has the largest production tires in the world at 4m, outshining those monster trucks (Bigfoot I think never had tires bigger than 3m).

I notice also a hole regarding ~30cm, multi-wheel. I say that space is filled by those amusement-park little trains. Yesss, they're "separate wagons," however, as it's several attached wagons operating together as a unit, for practical purposes, I say those trains constitute "one single" vehicle. Some have a very ingenious directional drive system, so wagons follow each other in the same path instead of a cathenary, for example in Disney; I was fascinated.Yamaplos (talk) 17:15, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

No mention either of the Rip Stick, which successfully employs only two castored wheels for locomotion. 172.68.23.189 18:11, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

Is there any reason the title text uses "tiny" twice? 172.71.150.3 22:38, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

I'm guessing it's meant to be interpreted as the tiny "single-tiny-caster" 172.71.150.2 22:50, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

(Inception Sound Effect)

Somewhere in the far corner of the chart:

Bagger 288

Fephisto (talk) 20:26, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

Somewhere in the upper right (but closer than that), the BelAZ_75710, what a missed opportunity! I think it has 8 wheels, 2 at each point a car has 1... I think each wheel is like 8 feet in diameter! NiceGuy1 (talk) 06:13, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

What a missed opportunity to include the 14 wheeled flowboard Scab (talk) 10:17, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

Since regular roller skates are pretty much gone now, seems wrong to miss standard rollerblades (4 wheels per skate, not the 3 Randall specified). Except it would go very close to the skates - I think the wheels aren't quite the same size - I guess that's why, but seems strange to choose the classic 2-by-2 skates over currently common rollerblades... NiceGuy1 (talk) 06:13, 15 September 2024 (UTC)