RescueRigger 3 Revision History

Force Calculations

• With a click of your mouse you can calculate the forces that are applied throughout a system.
   
• The forces can be displayed on your screen (as shown to the right), or displayed in mouse ScreenTips (as shown below).

• The forces can be calculated in kilograms, kilonewtons, or pounds.
   
• The mechanical advantage and maximum load are displayed on the Status Bar.

Flexible options let you specify:

• The weight of individual gear such as loads and litters (you can even specify the weight of a single carabiner),
• The friction of gear (including carabiners, pulleys, and brake bar racks),
• Where force labels are displayed, and
• Whether forces should be automatically recalculated.
   

The force calculations understand the complexities of friction, Prusiks, the difference between raising and lowering, etc. For example, the forces on a typical 3:1 system are much different when raising than when lowering (when the "ratchet" Prusik catches the load).

RescueRigger can solve amazingly complicated systems (click here to see a large example).

Overload Symbols

• Overload Symbols warn you of a potentially unsafe system based on the calculated forces.

	Forces are within limits
	Forces exceed the safety factor
	Forces exceed the gear's strength

• You specify the Safety Factor (e.g., 10:1) in the Options dialog. If the safety factor is exceeded, a warning symbol identifies the overloaded item(s).
   
• You specify the Strength of each piece of gear in the system in the Properties dialog. If the forces exceed the gear's strength, a breakage symbol is displayed on the overloaded item.
   
• The Overload Symbols apply to all gear, including individual rope segments.

New Gear Panel

The new Gear Panel uses an "Outlook-style" toolbar to separate the gear by category. For example, all of the anchors are now grouped together.

A new Options dialog lets you remove rarely used gear from the Gear Panel. For example, a fire service might remove the piton from the list of gear.

New Properties Dialogs display important information, such as details on the forces being applied to a single piece of gear. You can customize the weight, friction, and breaking strength of each piece of gear from within this dialog.

You can also change the gear's rotation, flipping, and sizing from the new Properties dialog. Of course, you can still change this information using the mouse as in version 2.0.

• Text can now be Rotated in any direction.
   
• Text is now edited from the Properties dialog to be consistent with the other gear.

• Webbing can be displayed in multiple colors. This is also edited from the new Properties dialog.
   
• You can now change the width of rope and webbing.

Clipboard Support

• You can now copy the workspace to the clipboard. This is great if you are working with PowerPoint, as you no longer need to crop RescueRigger's menus and borders from the image. In fact, most of the images on this page were captured with RescueRigger's new clipboard commands.
   
• When you copy the workspace to the clipboard, you can copy it as small (good for email), medium (good for computer presentations), or large (good for desktop publishing).

Other Improvements

• The RIG file extension is now registered with Windows when you install RescueRigger. This lets you double-click on any RescueRigger file to quickly open it.
• The Insert menu has been rearranged to group the gear into categories.
• The sample files have been updated to reflect the above changes.
• There is a new file format. Version 3.0 can read files from previous versions, but files created with version 3.0 cannot be read by earlier versions.
• Dozens of other minor enhancements were made.
• The information in the Help file has been updated to include the above changes.