Going fast

[NobleWizard]

Hello,

I've been playing a for a few months now and there are a lot of fast pilots. So I wanted to know why you are fast and are there any tips you can give me so I can improve.

Thank you,
UFO

[wickid]

What kind of tasks?

Tasks with thermals it's about only turning the really good ones and flying according mcready theory.

Ridge tasks it's about finding the correct route and gaining just enough altitude to make it across ridges enroute.

Practice, practice, practice!

[janjansen]

Download and install the optional module "15 years of competition experience" in to your brain

Seriously though, its kinda to hard to know where to start without knowing what (if any) real life experience you have, or seeing some flights of you to see what you already do right and what you still do wrong, so I glanced over some flights of you on condor club to get an idea, and it appears you got at least most of the basic principles nailed down, as you are flying with ballast, you appear to take mostly sensible routes and I assume you are familiar with McCready theory. IOW, i think you are doing ok for a new pilot.

One thing I did notice that needs work, is your final glide, at least on the tchintchin task you went way too high. Do you know how to use the final glide page on your PDA?

Another very general remark; you seem to thermal a little more than necessary; its usually better to climb in a straight line flying along the ridges than it is climbing in a thermal. Of course it all depends on how strong the thermal is, how strong the ridge lift, how high and how long and off track the ridge is, but when thermaling, your ground speed is ~ zero and that is not good for your average.

I think your best option is simply to practice. Real life soaring champions are often bald or grey, there is a reason for that, you cant have 25 years of flying experience when you are 30. So fly online as often as you can, and dont feel bad about following some good pilots and see what they do. If you cant keep up, download their flight tracks from condor club and compare them to your own flight, or even load them in to condor as ghosts and fly the task again following them. It may also help to get on teamspeak and ask what people do and why.

Lastly, it can also pay to watch some live streams on youtube from pilots like Tim Madsen or Ben Fest.

[EDB]

You learn from your mistakes...

... so make many...

[UrosM]

Learning by doing.

Do it wrong, learn more.

Never make the same mistake twice.

[janjansen]

You cant learn from your mistakes when you dont know you are making them, and its not always obvious to know what (or that) you did something wrong. Especially on servers without real time scoring and limited icon range, sometimes you may be pleased with your flight, only to find at the finish line that others beat you by 20 minutes or more. If you dont watch replays (or streams), its not clear to me how you would learn much from that.

[UrosM]

Of course, you must compare your flights to someone better, otherwise you'll never know.

Using SCI, Soaringlab or something similar is mandatory. And as janjansen said, youtube streams are invaluable source of informations.

[blacksun]

If you are flying in a condor-club.eu task/competition, once the results are out, compare your flight to those that beat you on the condor-club.eu website.
From the Race Results page of the task, tick your flight and up to 4 others that beat you, then click on the 'Replay the race' link. In the page that gets returned towards the bottom click on the 'Play' link. You will then see the flights of the pilots you selected, it isn't quite as detailed as downloading the flight log and using it with a thirdparty app or as a ghost pilot but it can highlight how people flew different routes, flew faster than you, and how high they climbed/stayed. It is also possible the scub through the flight log by dragging the mouse around in the bottom window.

For an example, take the track of some of the more successful pilots compared to me:
https://www.condor-club.eu/showrace/0/? ... &rp=122440

From that I can see that I (Martyn Weber), climbed in more thermals than the faster pilots (who flew through some of the thermals I climbed in). In many cases I stayed in the thermal to climb higher than the leaders but that didn't equate to a higher average speed. My route planning in this task wasn't that different from the winners, but when flying fast I always held back a bit, especially on final glide (unfortunately not all the map is visible on that webpage). I also arrived with a lot of height over the landing field which is another sign that my final glider could have been flown faster.
Another thing to note about this page view, is some pilots start later than others (although whether this affects scores depends on the start type) and also the different glider classes flown affected the scoring; the blue glider (Max Maslak) was slower than all the others but came second due to different glider classes flown).

[Crakob]

my two cents too

i had the same questions when i started last year. (And still i wonder a lot of times "how did they do that

1st thing i learned: fly with water
2nd: i did a lot of "flying with ghosts" to practice thermaling. Take a ghost of a god pilot, fly close behind and see how he enters the thermals and how smooth and even his circles.

You ca do the same with ridgesoaring. Very interesting to see where the top pilots slow down, in what distance/position to the ridge they are flying and where they speed up.

Also watching my own streams helps a lot to analyse my mistakes.

And as said a lot of times Fly a lot. (And watch what the others are doing

i'm far from flying fast alone ( i really need that 15 year experience module janjansen was mentioning

[tiberius]

You are far too modest CRA... you’re one of the fastest on tchin tchin!

I second everything CRA said. Despite gliding in IRL (95% thermal) myself, I had a lot to learn off the fast pilots in Tchin Tchin to become remotely competitive. The great thing is that you never stop learning... or making mistakes no matter how good you are.

[NobleWizard]

Thank you all for the replies. It has helped a lot and turns out I'm already doing most of the the things mentioned. I'm a glider pilot IRL but with only about 30 solo flights with no real xc flights, longest being 60km. So I just need to practice a lot, fly against some ghosts and look into MC theory a bit more. Then hopefully I'll be in the top 10.

[Bre901]

About MC theory, the thing that has most importance is your average climb rate in thermals (from bottom to top) , not the MC setting.
For a given climb rate, you are better off if you set the MC below the average climb rate (if the climb is 5 kts I set the MC around 3-4), you will be more comfortable and your average cross-country speed will not be affected that much.

[janjansen]

I remember being told that, counter intuitively, the impact of setting your mccready ring too high, proportionally, is actually less than setting it too low.
Of course, ignoring all the rl stuff like avoiding getting low and have less chance of finding a good thermal, landing out etc, . Just purely theoretical impact on cross country speed.

I was googling to see if I could find anything backup up my memory, and came across this instead:
https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/john.c ... wmcred.pdf

I have only glanced over it, it doesnt even seem to support my above statement, but it sure looks interesting for anyone interested in diving a little deeper in to Mc Cready theory and its impact on racing.

[tiberius]

Wow that almost takes the fun out of gliding J-J!

[Bre901]

About MC theory, the thing that has most importance is your average climb rate in thermals (from bottom to top) , not the MC setting.
For a given climb rate, you are better off if you set the MC below the average climb rate (if the climb is 5 kts I set the MC around 3-4), you will be more comfortable and your average cross-country speed will not be affected that much.

Here is a plot I hade made some time ago (C1 LS8-18 @ max W/L) - apologies for the typo in the title

the red curve is a direct output of the MC theory : cruise speed vs MC setting = climb rate (optimal cruise speed)

the blue curve depicts the sensitivity of the cruise speed vs the MC setting for a given climb rate : one can see that the cruise speed is indeed maximal when MC setting = climb, but that optimum is actually quite flat
.

MC_setting.jpg

I remember being told that, counter intuitively, the impact of setting your mccready ring too high, proportionally, is actually less than setting it too low.

A close look at the curve shows indeed that MC = 4 (Vz+2) gives a (slightly) better cruise speed (85.8 km/h) than MC = 0 (Vz-2) (81 km/h) ...
but it won't make me change my mind