On Jun 24, 7:50*am, T8 wrote:
On Jun 23, 8:32*pm, JS wrote:

Steve has hit one on the head.
Jim

No, I disagree. *If you passed your glider written without cheating,
you can understand the rules in a couple hours.

BB is right -- simple formulae gave simple minded results.

Non-rules-fanatics can stop reading here :-).

The existing scoring formulae -- which I don't like, see above -- do
function in an interesting way. *What they do is substantially devalue
MATs, provided you make minimum distance and finish. *Fly minimum
distance and finish, voila, you get max distance points plus 30. *Fly
MD + 1 on an assigned task day, and you're toast. *Example herehttp://tinyurl.com/n3tg3s. *One of the strangest thermal soaring days
I've flown and I read it wrong (I had some distinguished company).
Essentially, I landed out at the finish line, an hour early on a two
hour minimum MAT. *But I made 52 miles (Minimum distance in this case
is 50). *I gave up only 173 pts to the winner, who flew 2.5x my
distance at decent speed. *On the basis of speed and minimum time, I
should have scored about 415 points less than the winner.
Essentially, I received a bonus for getting a finish of some 242
points. *You can see what happened to the guys that didn't make MD and
therefore didn't get a finish. *Curtains.

-Evan Ludeman / T8

When pilot selected tasks were first done, we had a scoring system
that awarded points partly by distance flown and partly by speed
achieved.
The SadPost as we called it back then was seen as too complicated to
fly and do strategy for, so we moved to the time limited tasks we
have today because they are simpler and easier to understand and
score. The downside is that it is arguable if they as accurately
measure pilot performance on short or marginal days.

None of the current tasking is hard to understand as far as tactics.
Time is not at all critical but, to score well, you need to fly beyond
minimum time. If you come back early, you leave points on the table.
If you have a bad spot, try to fly longer to reduce the affect of the
lost time. That pretty much covers it.

Related to the first message in this string, John Good did a quick
check and the scoring looks correct. It is worth noting that his
comparison of scores relative to current WGC scoring showed that under
WGC scoring, the points compression would have been tighter than ours.
That is the approximately 180 pt spread under US rules would have been
about 120 pt under WGC rules.
FWIW
Good discussion
UH