If anyone is able to locate any information on that tent separate from the XV-JP, would like to hear about it. I seriously doubt that ER would sell a shell model of the XV-JP, but maybe.
Well, my friends, you are welcome to any information you care to have on the EarthRoamer XV-JP tent, among which facts . . .
No ER shell plans at this point, I don't think, probably because you guys wouldn't buy any.
I suspect you'd be looking at maybe $20K or more for the XV-JP shell. It is very nice work, done by a company that does aerospace composites. Very thick, very rigid--you can dance around on the top, for example, it's about 2 inches thick in spots--and very high quality. Beyond the cost, I'll bet a lot of you would consider it too heavy; an XV-JP weighs about 7,000 pounds.
The tent is, as I understand it, a completely custom-made item, sourced from the US solely for EarthRoamer. The volume of the XV-JP (just over a dozen) was, I suspect, not enough to interest a tentmaker we'd have heard of (e.g., Kelty, Mountain Hardware, etc.) in the job.
The air support idea is very cool and trick, but there's not enough rigidity to keep the tent from moving quite a bit in a stiff wind. The tent is also noisy in a wind.
When you flip over the top, you need a good amount of overhead clearence, something on the order of 14-15 feet. A couple times, I parked the Jeep, went to raise the tent and found I had branches in the way.
The bed is enormous, pretty much queen size. The matttress had to be thin, however, to be skinny and light enough to attach to the roof, so the Froli plastic spring setup had to be used underneath. It works fine, but its a cost and complexity you might not think of.
The tent had some areas where it leaked. I suspect most foul weather users XV-JP have devised/will devise some sort of rainfly to solve this problem.
THE BIG--and unsolvable--PROBLEM for the ER tent and any tent like this is that when you've deployed it in the rain and then it's time to move on, you are folding up fifty-plus pounds of wet tent and storing it wet. Not any different than you have to do with a backpack tent; you just dry it out first chance you get. The problem in the Oregon winter was getting it dried out. You could put the backpacking tent in your garage to dry, but drying the big flip tent meant putting it up on a nice sunny day, and we don't have them on a regular (or even occasional) basis much of the year. And even though I am fortunate enough to have a shop big enough to park the XV-JP with the tent deployed, it was still cold and damp enough that the wet areas took many days to dry out. This resulted in mildew on the tent and some surface rust on metal in the cabin.
I point this out because wet tent storage may be an issue for anyone with this sort of fixed tent planning to use it in a climate where winter "drying out days" are hard to come by.
