Shortcomings with the 5.11 Rush 12

It's has been a little under four months since I acquired the 5.11 Rush 12 and I've come to realize some of the shortcomings which I've failed to see earlier. Using the pack on a daily basis over these months has changed my perception a little for the worse.

First, and also my biggest gripe with the 5.11 Rush 12, is that it has absolutely no ventilation to speak off. The Rush 12 simply features four slightly raised panels at each corner of the pack which touches your back. Slightly meaning it's not nearly enough to raise the pack off your back in a way meaningful enough to allow any air to flow into the area. As such, carrying the bag is akin to carrying an oven. I've perspired immensely whenever I carry it with both straps on. This is further made worse by the weather in tropical Singapore; hot and humid all year round. A short walk of a couple hundred meters will often leave the back of my shirt drenched in sweat. I now resort to carrying this pack on one strap whenever it's a sunny day outside; not the best of solutions given my usual load. In my opinion, 5.11 should seriously consider incorporating mesh ventilation panels in future revisions of their Rush packs.

The rubber patches found on the side in contact with my back could also be done away with. I think they are largely unneccessary since they don't really help the pack in staying still against my back. These also abrade away at the clothes I'm wearing and mine have shown serious signs of wear from just normal everyday school use.

Next, I can't say I'm the biggest fan of the strap which incorporates a neck yoke system. It does indeed do it's job of distributing some of the weight onto your neck but for the most part the yoke simply gets in the way of comfort.

Over on the other side of the pack, the compression straps aren't the most effective straps as there is only a pair of them, situated in the upper half of the pack. The bottom of the pack is usually where most of my items end up, making the placement of the compression straps at the upper half of the pack quite a poor decision indeed. At the very least, I think the compression straps should be situated right in the centre of the pack, but the best solution would be of course to have a pair of compression straps, one serving the upper portion and another serving the lower portion.

I'd also like if 5.11 made a size in-between the Rush 12 and the Rush 24. The Rush 24 is much too large for me at over 32.7 litres of capacity, yet the next smaller option is immediately the Rush 12 which is over 11 litres less at 21.2 litres. A pack at 25 litres so would be the perfect size for me, and could well exist as a Rush 18.

Recently though, there seems to be a bag which overcomes all these shortcomings; a pack from Helikon-Tex's Direct Action line known as the Dragon Egg. It's 25 litres in capacity, has a meshed ventilation system to keep things cool, features normal straps that doesn't have a neck yoke nor does it have the rubber patches and has compression straps across the upper and lower part of the pack. It looks really nice too, barring two problems; it's constructed in 500D Cordura and also there's the rather hefty price of around EUR115. I'd have preferred 1000D or 1050D nylon construction, althought it's already 1.4kg with 500D construction so I think 1000D would have been unnecessarily heavy. I'm not too sure about the paracord handle but I think I'll assess that when I have the pack itself.

So that's it for today's post, thanks for reading!