SuperCPen -- designed for RPB

Was off on a trip for a couple of days, all those lively discussions I missed!

It is so nice to see people objectively discussing issues instead of making subjective conclusion without first hand experience on a subject.  And thank you Anton for your support!  I am really happy you found SuperCPen to be a helpful product.

I thought I will share a few observations from my development work on the handle. 

One the width of the handle -- both Sweetstrike and Anton has hit right on one of the reasons I made it so wide.  It gives you better control and precision because of the increased leverage.  I did quite a bit of experimentation with this, and choose the width I believe would provide the optimal trade off.  From the look of it, the width would not be good for doing TBH.  That was what I thought too until I tried it.  It is quite counter intuitive how this could be.  But once you have tried it, I believe you will be convinced.  I am more comfortable about saying this now, because Anton had independently confirmed it.

I also agree with Anton that it could be easier for a shakehand player to adapted to the SuperCPen than a CPen layer with a fine tuned strokes.  Anton already gave an excellent explanation for how this may be.  I, however, have personal antidotal evidence for this.  I had being play a short pip pen hold game based on flat hitting.  At one time I switched to shakehand and learning the forehand loop turned out to be much easier than with the penhold.  This was because the change was so big with shakehand grip, that I could not possibly slip back into a flat hitting blade angle like I was prone in doing when looping with a penhold.  Even today in a game, my shots under stress will turn to more like a hit than a loop.

The SuperCPen is designed to provide a very secure and stable grip, that is, it minimizes relative motion between the blade and the players hand.  This way, the blade is always at an angle that you intended it to be.  Many people seem to think that the traditional CPen, being easy to move around in you grip, provide more "flexibility" so it is good.  My humble opinion is that this is exactly what you don't want if you want to achieve consistent strokes.  Of course this does not mean it is impossible to achieve consistent strokes using CPen.  Wang Hao has done it.  But who knows if he wouldn't have gotten where he is sooner and easier if he had something better?

My education backround was one important factor that led me to come up with the SuperCPen.  My degree was in Electrical and Computer Engineering with a specialization in Control System Theory as applied to Robotics.  In this field we study the equations of motion, which describe how force results in motion.  One goal is to come up a way to apply the force under dynamic and kinematic constraints to achieve optimal trajectory under some criteria.  This training guided me along in the various iterations of the SuperCPen, so that each change has some analytical reasoning for direction, rather than a purely random trial and error process. 

Later...