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I’d take a well designed and built frame with a lower spec damper over a misaligned, poorly thought out frame with a fancy one any day. You can upgrade a damper, it’s much harder to upgrade out of bad engineering and manufacturing. As has been said above, even then, some shock spec or kinematic choices will mean different things to different riders.

Whichever bike has the best damper tune specced probably wins at that point. I'm pretty sure that's a big deciding factor between bikes with different linkage designs also though. You would need control wheels, and tires at a minimum, and probably drivetrain also to get any useful data about which frame works better.

If we compare the new horst link tallboy with the Allied Fitz, Forbidden Reya and Transition Smuggler, there a few difference: Tallboy is the only bike using a trunion shock most likely a 185x50, Smuggler and Fitz use a normal 210x50 shock and Reya use a 190x45 shock. So Reya most likely have a higher starting leverage ratio that could limit heavier rider that are getting close to the shock max pressure. Reya, Smuggler and most likely Tallboy use double bearing setup at the chainstay. Santa Cruz does the same for the Bullit and Vala. Allied Fitz has no exploded...

I’d love to see a shoot out of trail bikes using the same linkage designs. It would really interesting to start to dig a bit deeper as to what sets them apart - quality control, kinematics, maintenance, etc etc.

visual summary

New Tallboy all through this: https://youtu.be/06aPj2jKe4U?si=n0VbMiFXlzlGwgF2

Remember the good old days when we talked about bikes on here?

Madrone with a DH set up is rad!

evil DH bike?

some would say bikes shouldn’t have motors either but here we are.

RR is the most successful enduro rider ever plus the sb160 the most successful enduro bike, why shouldn‘t they celebrate that with some special editions… especially when the successor bike is on the horizon

They must have a bit too many sb160s in stock they need to get rid off 👀

Double upvote.

One thing missing here is the fact that with the proliferation of composite know how, there are more people around able to safely repair a wider range of issues. Rather than pretending we are recycling carbon bikes I’d love to see more frames designed in ways that facilitate repair. Repair is verifiable in a way that recycling is not, it is cost effective for everyone concerned, and it is as close as you’ll get to good for the environment. It probably flows on to other design decisions to ensure repair is viable (like bearing placement, etc etc), but designing bikes...

The SL version with the 75nm/700W motor is a far neater and better integrate dpackage imo.

God that new Rocky's motor arrangement looks UGLY AF to me. Something about it, maybe the big triangular block coupled with the rear triangle, reminds me of commuter ebikes. I swear it looks bigger than any other motor on the market. It's a shame because if I cover over that part of the bike with my finger, the rest of the bike looks nice/normal.

Probably not going to be featured under "Beautiful bicycles" on the Radavist.

All these aerospace grade components and I still can barely get any air.

You are already riding bikes with aerospace carbon fiber. The actual fiber is the same as what's used in aerospace. Example: Toray T1100 is the world's strongest fiber and used in both bikes and aero. T1200 coming and will be 10% stronger. What's different is mainly the resin and the process of making the bike. Note I could argue some of the bike parts I've seen are actually more complex and high performance than many aerospace manufacturers would/could make. It's impressive how far we've come in this industry.

Would love to see this convo moved over to a thread called “thermoplastic debate/discussion” or similar. This is a dead end technology for now but I understand that a lot of you like talking about it.