Originally Posted by
cyccommute
Total crock. What's "mechanical" about sticking a pole in the ground and running a bunch of guy wires out to keep the pole from falling over? And then hoping that the wind doesn't come up and blow the whole thing down?
It gets mechanical when that doesn't work, in sand, snow, dense gravel, solid rocks, not trees when they are needed, etc...
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I've used a non-freestanding tent exactly once and ended up rebuilding the damned thing in the middle of the night when it collapsed.
You sound like the stereotype that proves the rule.
On the other hand I've used freestanding tents for hundreds of nights without any issues in all kinds of weather from wind storms to thunderstorms to 4" of snow in all manner of locations.
Tarps are a bad choice for 4 inches of snow. I replaced quite a few Everest worthy FS tents when I was in the biz. VE24 where the main ones. But the conditions were generally extreme. The kind you could not make forward progress on a bike in. FS tents are good if you like the weight and other problems. Everything has the flaws of it's strengths.
They can be used in as many places as tarp tents
That is meaningless, every time you move your tent 1 thou "hey look, it is a new place". If you have the ability to get your tent/tarp up anywhere you need it, it comes down to the other features. If you aren't mechanical in that way, you need a tent with a suitable big diaper pin to hold it all together for you.
and offer some niceties that are often missing in tarps tents like double walls to reduce condensation
Now that is funny, double walls are the next best thing to a solar still. They provide the illusion of ventilation with none of the pesky reality.
And each freestanding tent I've owned has come with anchors...they are called tent pegs.
I'm sure when you were a child you got a paintbox, that does not make you an artist. There are a lot of better tools than pegs, and there are a lot of different levels of ability, take your story for example. Small hooks are lighter and a lot more secure. Then a background in anchors also helps, mainly the rock climbing kind, but also the marine, or something equivalent. FS tents have a lot of pluses, but you could see it on their shinning faces as they plunked down the cash, the certainty that the dang things would not fall down was the selling point.