On Sunday, December 24, 2017 at 1:07:56 PM UTC-8, jfitch wrote:
Andy, why not just penalize the altitude gain and distance along course made during the engine run? It would all be in the log file and you wouldn't need to worry about what did it.

You definitely need to not give credit for cruise-climb distance made, but the bigger impact on speed is the benefit of the climb rate versus what otherwise would have been the case. You can't really directly subtract altitude, you have to turn it into either time or distance to translate the penalty to time/distance = speed.

If you can climb at 4 knots under power then a rough breakeven penalty versus a 1 knot climb without power would be around 7 minutes per minute under power. If you want to set the "breakeven" unpowered climb rate at 2 knots, it's around 4 minutes per minute under power and at 3 knots it's around 2.5 minutes per minute under power. Under each penalty structure it would be to the pilot's benefit to use the motor any time (s)he is faced with a climb slower than the breakeven rate. I picked 5 minutes per minute, or around 150 ft/min breakeven.

You could also turn altitude gain into a scored distance penalty at some sort of glide angle translation, assuming an L/D, which would correspond to a speed to fly for a lift condition. I haven't messed with that, but I assume you could construct something equivalent to the time penalty.

9B