I meant more than some number of seconds that constitutes a tie so that pilots don't do crazy stuff to establish primacy on thermal entry - probably less than 30 seconds. But you'd have to count as leeching spying a thermal from 5 miles away and using it even if the marking glider was gone by the time you got there and the penalty time would have to persist for some duration after the prior glider(s) had left. I think the math worked out if you added around 5-7 seconds for each minute of climbing in a leeched thermal.

It would be straight forward to write code to look at IGC files and calculate time penalties, I just don't think anyone would like it because I don't think the stealth debate is principally about leeching. If it were a fix would have been implemented 20 years ago.

9B