I'm announcing a silly competition for silly prizes. This is something that I'm personally doing so please don't give any of our many hard working club officials a hard time about this. All abuse should be aimed at me.
Goal:
Fly the biggest circle in a year
Prize:
A box of doughnuts and possibly a little something more.
Currently just an open to all comers but if you like this idea an you'd like to donate a prize in general or for a specific category please get in touch!
Rules:
Flight must take place in western Canada
Single flight (no relaunching)
The circle must fit completely inside your track
Your track must be closed to within 20% of the circle diameter
All the other usual XC rules - no breaking airspace etc
Background:
I've been thinking about one of the earliest cloudbase mayhem podcasts with Bill Belcourt and the discussion about aesthetic lines. Coupled with that there have been a few inspirational flights, by pilots other than me natch', over the past couple of seasons covering substantial amounts of tiger country. I've come to the conclusion that, for me, an aesthetic line is the out and return while minimizing the flying over the same terrain in a given flight.
Evaluation/Judging:
Still currently in development, I've been developing an automated script that usually calculates the circle. You can find it here link if you want to test things yourself. Be warned it currently requires some coding knowledge to process specific files, it's slow and the output is full of debug junk. Also due to the method I use for placing the circle inside the track I have to transpose the 3D tracklog onto a 2D plane, the method I use for this can lead to north-south and east-west switches but I think the overall geometry is preserved. Keep an eye on this space.
How to enter:
Sadly I can't get bulk/batch access to XContest for processing myself so if you have a flight you'd like evaluated, whether it's out of curiosity or you think you might be a contender for the GLORIOUS PRIZE send me a link to it on Xcontest, I'll process it let you know how it goes and if its a contender update this thread with the result.
Examples:
These are some of the flights I used to develop the script. Scale is in meters, unfortunately I can't display them on a map yet. Just to be clear, these are not entries, no one has entered this competition as of writing.
11/06/19 - Igor Tolsky - 61.990 km
- ex2-27045m.png (20.94 KiB) Viewed 1614 times
Have fun,
Tom
Advance Iota (Purple, white and lime green)
