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Condensation is a fact of life when camping in tents. The physics is simple: moisture carried in the warm air inside a tent condenses on contact with a cool flysheet – typically, when the outside temperature drops overnight. The result is water on the wrong, inner side of the fly.

The volume of water vapour ready to condense on your flysheet is a direct product of environmental factors (ground and air humidity) and human activity – we breathe, perspire and insist on drinking hot steamy tea, brewed up in the porch, inside our tents.

The only solution is to remove water vapour before it condenses, which for our Lightwave chemical engineer-cum-tent designer (Carol McDermott) means a ventilation system based on three years’ not entirely wasted study of fluid mechanics and thermodynamics. For air to move through a channel without stalling (and consequently condensing on the fabrics around it), frictional drag must be kept to an absolute minimum. In other words, the passage followed by the air must be kept short and straight. In Lightwave tents, this is achieved by aligning scooped vents at the front and back of the flysheet with cut-outs in the mesh of the pole sleeves, creating unobstructed air channels between the inner and the fly.

It is another fact of life, however, that even the best-aligned vents can only work if there is a mechanism to move the air – and the only one available is our erratic friend, the wind. Lightwave vents work in anything from a gentle breeze upwards and in fact we’ve rarely closed them even in storms. (In clouds of Scottish midges, on the other hand, you’ll be glad of the Velcro seal.) It is a bitter irony of tent design, nevertheless, that features such as low-cut flysheets and impermeable silicone-coated fabrics only contribute to the problem of condensation – by trapping humidity inside the tent, and keeping out the very weather that could carry it away.