Parachute

In Game

• As of yet we do not know how Parachutes will work or Integrate into the game's mechanics. However as Leonardo da Vinci is still a character within the game it is heavily likely that he will actually invent the Parachute ingame and you will be able to use it in a mission, similar to the Flying machine when assassinating Carlo Grimaldi or it will be used as an ability in the Multiplayer or Single Player as a way of surviving large falls.

Real World Perspective

• The earliest evidence for the parachute dates back to the Renaissance period. The oldest parachute design appears in an anonymous manuscript from 1470s Renaissance Italy showing a free-hanging man clutching a cross bar frame attached to a conical canopy. As a safety measure, four straps run from the ends of the rods to a waist belt. The design is a marked improvement over another folio which depicts a man trying to break the force of his fall by the means of two long cloth streamers fastened to two bars which he grips with his hands. Although the surface area of the parachute design appears to be too small to offer effective resistance to the friction of the air and the wooden base-frame is superfluous and potentially harming, the revolutionary character of the new concept is obvious.
• Only slightly later, a more sophisticated parachute was sketched by the polymath Leonardo da Vinci in his Codex Atlanticus dated to ca. 1485. Here, the scale of the parachute is in a more favourable proportion to the weight of the jumper. Leonardo's canopy was held open by a square wooden frame, which alters the shape of the parachute from conical to pyramidal. It is not known whether the Italian inventor was influenced by the earlier design, but he may have learnt about the idea through the intensive oral communication among artist-engineers of the time.
• The feasibility of Leonardo's pyramidal design was successfully tested in 2000 by the British Adrian Nicholasa nd again in 2008 by another skydiver. According to the historian of technology Lynn White, these conical and pyramidal designs, much more elaborate than early artistic jumps with rigid parasols in Asia, mark the origin of "the parachute as we know it".

  File:Leonardo-da-vinci-inventions.3.jpg

  Leonardo's Parachute design