Some folks get confused by the hammock tarptents I designed back several years ago and posted photos on the Yahoo Hammock Camping Group and on WhiteBlaze. As far as I know, that was the pioneering work on enclosing hammocks with a tarp or tent like structure but that design was never put in production.
I used what I learned from that when I designed what became the Speer WinterTarp which Speer Hammocks started selling last fall. The WinterTarp is not as complicated, sets up easier that my original design, and sets up very taut in a variety of pitches, more so that other large tarps because of the use of 4 strategically placed catenary darts along with the catenary cuts on all ten edges of the tarp. To my knowledge it is the first tarp design to use catenary darts to improve tautness of variable pitch options and the first to shape the corners so they don't tend to drag the ground when you pitch close to the ground and want to angle the corners inward over a wide range to block wind. The catenary darts form somewhat of a hinge line for the shaped corners of the tarp when they function as independent doors or flaps. These independent doors or flaps allows for more variation in how one handles blocking the wind without adding too much to condensation issues when the wind dies out. You often need to compromise in how you handle wind versus having adequate ventilation... and vice versa.
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