lack the “ran out of gear” ability of a DF to stand on the pedals.
That's a bit of a mute point in most recumbents as you have the recumbent seat's backrest as a sturdy support. Relying on gravity to hold you down is rather a limitation. Depending on preferred technique you might plant your butt and work the bike like a bench press or plant your shoulders, lift your butt and use your core as part of the actual pedaling motion.
And on the racy cruzbikes you have very sturdy handles close to the line of your pedaling force, so you can really pull yourself into the pedals even more.
But gear setup is of course important anyway!
Had you found
ritzelrechner.de
or
gear-calculator.com
respectively? No Idea, if more languages are available. It has a very large assortment of cassettes (and gearboxes!) available for quick setup, but of course also allows manual entry. Changing chainrings to shift the gear range if extremely simple with immediate visual feedback. And you could already visually compare two setups in the old version. Entry and display are very intuitive, yet very dense and offer a lot of information, well presented.
With
ritzelrechner.de/new
gear-calculator.com/new
(not sure if it's already available in Englisch, I only ever automatically see it in German. But the translation function in modern browsers seems to work well.)
not only can you add more configurations for simultaneous comparison, but you can even upload a recording of a specific ride and get the actually ridden speeds underlayed to see where you need gears the most.
If you need to prepare for a gradient you have never ridden up before, I'd simply also open
kreuzotter.de/deutsch/speed.htm
kreuzotter.de/english/espeed.htm
and with a quick change of entered data you can see the power you need to ride the speed necessary for any given gear or rather put in what power you wanna ride at and get the speed you can achieve, so you can set your small chainring accordingly.
Could be an interesting idea to ask both developers, if they could integrate one tool into the other so you can see live changes to the gradient/power when you change the gear setup, as you wanted.
But even individually I find both tools so good to use and powerful, that I wouldn't leave them, yet.
But now actually a few notes to your new tool.
You have that needed power calculated and displayed for every gear. I think you only need to have that for the easiest gear. Probably the current method uses similar code to the other displays, but if you wanna use the tool well, it could improve the readability to remove all that clutter.
You are working with cadance ±20RPM. Those 20rpm can't be changed while using it? For cadences around 100rpm that's a swing of ±20%, that makes multiple gears overlap needlessly. Someone who wants to keep their cadance constant needs to set it to a certain percentage to see gaps in the gearing. Only the first and last gear could need an additional longer bar to see how far you can push it, if you have to.
There's no way to save and load a configuration, right? Ritzelrechner uses the URL to input all the data. That way you can generate a link to save and/or share for advice.
Like here's a comparison of my V20c and my Sequoia (recumbent fatbike)
[edit: Hope all links are good now…]
