Hard Deck

On Sunday, January 28, 2018 at 7:45:05 AM UTC-7, wrote:
(Not really a contest pilot here, so read with a grain of salt.)

I can see that the rules make the game and the current rules might encourage some folks to be unsafe. A hard deck data base with penalties seems a possible way to help this, but getting the details right for a hard deck database seems problematic if it is not to significantly limit strategy options.

Perhaps a simpler alternative would be a list of designated landing sites for a contest day.

Penalties would be accessed for not always keeping at least one under you according to some simple equation. (Perhaps looking at only L/D, minimum energy over terrain, and safety altitude.)

The goal is to not fix everything, but at least nudge strategic thinking in a safer direction.

The problem with that sort of approach is that there is no formula that can work. Not only do gliders differ in glide performance but the atmosphere differs a lot from time to time. Late in the day at a flat land site with no wind you might be able to count on 40:1 but in other circumstances 15:1 is all that is reasonably safe. Wind plays a big role in glide angles as well. What's more, the idea of creating a comprehensive database is impractical. For any given contest site that is about a one-man-year task. There is nobody to do that for us. If it has rained recently, it changes. If crops come up, it changes. Picking your very own out-landing place is pretty fundamental to the game.

The problem with that sort of approach is that there is no formula that can work. Not only do gliders differ in glide performance but the atmosphere differs a lot from time to time.

Thanks for the feedback and help in my understanding. To clarify what I was thinking...

I left WX out of the list of things to consider for the penalty on purpose. It did not seem fair to have penalties accessed based on wind values that would not be known until the scoring program looked at all the IGC's and figured them out. A fallback position might be to publish an assumed wind and use if for scoring.

Regardless of each glider's actual performance, I was thinking of a single conservative polar for the contest. My thought was that this would be a sort of handicap to nudge scoring more to the pilot's skill instead of the ship performance.

For the landing points, it seems to me that the first unintended consequence would be the risk of a bunch of gliders crowding a single field. Perhaps landing areas would make more sense.

It seems to me that a simplified assumption of expected WX, unified polar, and landing areas are implicit in the drawing of the SUA's?