Top Hat Question (XCSoar?)

On Wednesday, July 11, 2018 at 8:24:36 PM UTC-4, Mike C wrote:
The XC Soar manual is relevant to learning Top Hat.


The XC Soar manual is relevant to Top Hat. The main difference is how the info is presented, not how it is set up.

Mike

Mike, you must work in IT.

I absolutely agree that the XCSoar Manual is relevant to Top Hat, more so than anything else I could find. But it's 187 (!!!) pages long, and much of the functionality described in it is not included in Top Hat. It's like telling someone that the answer they need is on the Internet. Go find it.

And setting up Top Hat IS different. It's a different user interface, including different screens and menuing. If you know what you want to find and do a search for it in the XCSoar manual, it's usually there. For example, I finally found the difference between Auto Zoom (zooms in when approaching turnpoints) and Circling Zoom (zooms in when thermaling). Then you have to find where it is in the Top Hat set up screens and menus.

But the Top Hat info is buried among things like: "Reach calculations may be configured to two levels of detail...If turning reach is enabled, then the reach shows the greatest area the glider can reach in all directions, even allowing turns around obstructions.[The maximum number of turns is set to three, and no turns may be greater than 90 degrees.]" This bit of "techno geeks go gliding" esoterica--just one paragraph out of 1 1/2 pages on the subject in the manual, is fun to read but not relevant to any U.S. contest flying I am familiar with. And, thankfully, it is not present (to my knowledge) in Top Hat.

So after inquiring of (a) the development team, (b) a user who's been involved in Top Hat almost from the beginning, and (c) various experts on RAS, I'm still not sure whether what I want to do can be done through configuration settings.

Chip Bearden