Thread: Designing the best back country tent in the market - Need you help

looking at your sitting up picture I cant help but be reminded of the pup tents I grew up with....I bought one from farmers store in Taumarunui 35 years ago and it lasted a good 25 years of HARD usage.... if you added a 3rd pole you could double length of fly over the top and have a HUGE vestible area the same size as pup tent infront of door..or out back if that tickled your fancy for some reason.... you could go without pole if in bush and had something to tie off to.
when I added the small fly I have over top of pup tend I ended up with narrow vestible down each side ,enough to lay riles and boots in out of worst of weather.
heck if you use a really cheap double poled dome tent and add a fly over the top pegged out as far as you can stretch it you achieve same goals for a very small price. sometimes we overcomplicate things. the big rectangle flys set up out front and over top give shit loads of room to stand up and cook/store gear.... lots easier in bush obviously.

Is it going to be free standing, above the Bush line it can be very difficult to use tent pegs.

Air frame , so many advantages.

Got no opinions, I like hammocks. But a hundred thumbs up for asking the question you did. Everything good must begin with a problem and user insight.

Puffin what a good design & you put a lot work into that but for me it would only be any good as a stay at the car tent as to me it looks as tho it going get heavy I do think what Micky duck said is right a small light weight tent then the option of a big fly that can't attach quick & easy to give the ones more hight & dry space if you want it, the down side would be siting up in tent because tent would probably be lower. It depends how mean days you plan on staying in it on a trip for me it would be a max off the 3 days so & I take all my gear & camp were I end up at the end off the day so a big heavy tent is a no go & don't need much room stop when dark set tent up tea bed up at day break watch that clearing from night before pack up & off. I do think it going be a pretty hard ask to design a tent that even works for % off hunters in NZ as so many people hunt so many different ways & different altitudes & I do get that a tops hunter probably needs a lot more space under cover than a bush hunter who can just throw pack under the tree for the night

Possibly going a bit out there with this, but could the apex seam have built in rechargeable LED lighting ? I've seen it in bigger tents but not in small backpacking ones. A friend brought me a dog collar from overseas with them built in and they are surprisingly bright. Recharges from a usb port.

Hi @hunt08. The initial brief is for 1.5kg or under so that is a given. I don't know if you consider that as too heavy to take away from the car or not, but I think Onamission's choice on this target weight is a very well considered one, inasmuch as going under that starts to rapidly narrow a number of design choices.

All I could offer for the Puffin1 — if 1.5kg is too much (and heavier than MD's small tent + fly, which it won't be) — is setting up in the fly-only mode, so dropping the inner and adding the separate footprint. I'm guessing that would bring weight down to 900-1000 grams for about three and a half square metres of under-cover space that excludes a 100mm clearance from the fly edges. A comparison in this configuration could then be made to the previously mentioned Kuiu Summit Star that is 740grams without the separate pole or inner (850g with pole) and with a similar covered area.

Yes, not free-standing. So thinking about what pegs would be needed that would not be needed for a free-standing design? Well if all the guy-out points are being taken out to rocks or tied around tussocks or dracophyllum, as they would be for a free-standing tent above the bushline, then that would be just the additional 4 pegs around the base, and yes there is a problem there as — unlike the guy-out points — there is almost no flexibility in their placement.

The above, and the ability or otherwise to handle high winds and snow are really the main aspects that have been traded off for the other benefits. I've watched the Hilleberg videos with the wind machine and there is no doubt that the shape of the Enan (or Laser), when securely guyed out, can take a hammering. It probably still can when extended to 1200mm tall and fitted with a slightly more robust pole. But agreed; it is not a tunnel or multipole dome tent, and won't be for folk who want or may be forced to tent in severe wind, when something in the 2.2—2.5kg class will be required.

I would thought that your design would be over the 2 kg with the size you want there isn't many tents they are under the 1.5 kg so my guess is that to go higher & bigger than most tent on the market it going end up heavier than most tents & this is only a guess

In my earlier description I didn’t directly address the issue of weight, only referring in passing to the upper limit of 1.5kg, as it had been specified in the original post as the starting point for this exercise. Without a target weight there is no need to make any compromises or balance any aspect of the size, strength and features, or the necessity for using light-weight materials at elevated cost. Instead the tent can have it all, and this thread changes to simply what features you likes to have in a 1-person tent for hunting trips. To imply that I hadn’t considered the weight is wrong. It now seems that it is necessary to say on what grounds I think the design would stay under 1.5kg.

First up there have been a proliferation of 1P tents come into the market in the past few years that are under 1.5kg; too many to list online links here. I even weighed my Macpac Microlight the other day and was surprised that the example I have here came in at exactly 1.5kg packed weight, and this is neither a new design or an expensive one. Let’s instead look at the two double-skinned tents on which my concept was a somewhat enlarged composite; the Terra Nova Laser Competition and replacement Compact and the Hilleberg Enan. We can look at the published weights for these very similar shapes as starting points along with some dimensions and then I’ll make educated estimates on how making a similar shape of tent larger as I was proposing would add to these starting weights.

Here is the Enan along with some specifications:



Packed weight: 1.2kg (flysheet & inner 884g, Pole 166g, 8 Pegs 76g, sundries 74g)
Inner / vestibule floor area: 1.7m² / 0.8m²
Pole length/diameter: 193cm / 9mm
Outside width / depth / height: 2.4m / 1.75m / 1.0m

Laser Compact:



Packed weight: 1.06kg,
Inner / vestibule floor area: unspecfied
Pole diameter: 8.7mm and 2 short end poles
Outside width / depth / height: 2.4m / 1.55m / 1.0m

In the concept tent where the depth is being increased 26-42% over these two tents for the large vestibule and the height by 20%, it follows from geometry that the length of the main pole will increase by 22-29%, and with the pole diameter stepping up to 10mm it will consequently weigh about 260grams, an increase of 100gr. The 2-piece end poles being longer will weigh 25gr more. The width is staying the same, as is the inner footprint, so the height change only applies to the amount of fabric used in the inner walls but not to the heavier material used in the tub floor. The above changes both apply to the amount of fabric to be used in the fly though, bearing in mind that an amount of the weight of any tent is in the fittings, seams & hems etc. that in some cases remain fixed as the area of fabric increases. From this the estimate is that the material increase to accommodate the larger size adds a further 100grams.

Adding things up takes the weight for the concept tent to somewhere between 1285gr and 1425gr with the difference between these figures and the 1500gram limit going into my other preferences of having a more robust material for the floor, a more complex inner door, double entrances for the fly, and some strengthening dictated by the potential for higher wind-loading. The weight available for these may be more as the promise of no limit on materials may be able to claw back some of the increases.

Just going back through this thread and wondered if having velcro attachment points inside the fly for a demountable, flame retardant patch over a designated cooking area would be beneficial.

Originally Posted by Andygr

over a designated cooking area would be beneficial.

Endorsing a cooking area inside a tent in todays world is asking for trouble. Both fire and Carbon monoxide risks.

No amount of warnings or labels will save you from the lowest common denominator. Sadly, people dont know what they don't know. If they haven't been taught.......

MSR Hubba Hubba, just the fly and a plastic ground sheet is my go to. Enough room for 2 people though is getting a bit tight. Roomy as for 1 person. Bombproof in terms of weather. If/when it gets real shit, turn the edges of the plastic ground sheet up and that keeps the rain out. Gotta be smart about where you put the plastic ground sheet but if it gets holes then a bit of duct tape (which I have in my first aid kit for emergencies) fixes it right up.

Originally Posted by Nugget connaisseur

Endorsing a cooking area inside a tent in todays world is asking for trouble. Both fire and Carbon monoxide risks.

No amount of warnings or labels will save you from the lowest common denominator. Sadly, people dont know what they don't know. If they haven't been taught.......

True, I was looking at the plan of Puffin's tent with the half open fly when I had the idea. The tent would have to be positioned to shield the stove and also allow adequate ventilation. Unfortunately there are too many "lowest common denominators" in the world.

Were you thinking of having a fire-resistant patch to allow the stove to be used inside the tent inner and protect the tub floor, because to be honest there isn't much room in these sizes of inner for that sort of thing along with yourself, sleeping gear, and the like? On the other hand I'm quite keen on the idea of sizing the vestibule to make it far more convenient to bring the cooking under cover, which is one of the reasons it has been made so large. In the standard configuration you'd have the stove on the bare ground. In fly-only mode the footprint may be sized to cover the entire area including the front half (normally vestibule), TBD on this, though I'm sure if it was, it could also be unhooked and folded back under itself to be a half-footprint just for the rear sleeping area, again allowing cooking on the bare ground (for when the meal boils over right?). Either way I'm sure you'd be fine. Fly partly open for ventilation? Even if not, the fly doesn't go down to the ground. This was to better control condensation but I guess the same applies for carbon monoxide. An important point to have raised that I hadn't considered.

Someone has an original model Macpac Eclipse up on Trademe at the moment, and has put up a lot of photos. Looking through these inspired me to have a play around with Photoshop and add a larger vestibule. The below tweaked Eclipse would suit me very well I think — snug one person sleeping and a much larger area for storage and cooking. Picture the original fly over the top, so the overall footprint is unchanged.