FLARM and Triathlon

On Wednesday, December 23, 2015 at 4:03:18 PM UTC-8, wrote:

I don't know what the algorithms and rules should be. Points assessed based on getting to the top and allowing someone else to lead out repeatedly? Or percentage of time in a run where you're in trail? Accumulate a certain number of points and start to incur time penalties? Number of times you enter a thermal behind the same guy within X seconds at the same altitude? 9B, you must have some ideas.


Totally possible - it's dirt simple to create (and I have proposed a version) a very mild penalty system for climbing in thermals you didn't get to within 30 seconds of the first entrant. Would be interesting to try, pretty easy to calculate from IGC files and, IMHO, totally unnecessary. But that's just me.

9B

The other direction. The penalty would apply to someone who enters a thermal LESS than, say, 20 seconds after the guy in front of him/her over and over again. I don't think it's dirt simple, although not hugely complex. It's a form of pattern recognition. No problem using someone else's thermal. But if that's all you do, especially if the same 1 or 2 or 3 pilots keep finding the thermals, and especially if there's not much vertical separation, then you're leeching and you shouldn't get the winner's time.

Not a drastic penalty. Just a disincentive to lock in behind one of the leaders and get towed around the course.

How's this for an incentive? Try it and I'll shut up about stealth.

Chip Bearden
ASW 24 "JB"
U.S.A.

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