Smash & Crash
A few days of crummy weather coupled with an itch to improve the Ups & Downs photo gallery gobbled up my attention span this past week.
I flew Thursday and Friday, hammering out a number of small wing combat sessions with Dave and Bruce. We had some satisfying collisions and are gradually sculpting a set of Combat Rules, none of which is retroactive.
The rules so far:
The goal is to hit an opponent’s wing and cause it to cease flying while you stay in the air.
Actually, those are the rules in their entirety. If you achieve the goal, you get credit for a kill.
What Does it Mean? It took us a few days to add the clause “while you stay in the air.” And we’re still wrangling over the nuances of the phrase. If you break your prop but stay in the air for 15 seconds and then glide to a graceful landing do you get credit for a kill?
That happened to Dave and he says “No credit,” but I think it’s too restrictive.
In the future, I think we’ll need a Wing Supreme Court to decide these foamy, I mean thorny, issues.
At various moments of Rule Flux Bruce got a kill, I got a kill and Dave got three kills. I think that’s right. But who’s counting?
Bless the Wind. As always, combat is most fun when the wind rises. Dave and I enjoyed one session in lively winds. Bill Smith joined our little wings with a home-brewed Stryker.
We jockeyed our small craft through the gusts and eddies, accelerating on the turns and achieving zero wing-to-wing contact.
But it was big fun.
The wind was so high that turns were scary. It was easier to fly into the wind, reduce speed and let the wings drift backwards, then accelerate into the wind again, forward and back, forward and back.
The best part of this combat is that small wings are immortal. I’ve slapped mine into the ground perhaps 30 times and caromed off about 20 other wings, and it still doesn’t look dog-eared.
In the course of all this mayhem I’ve replaced a few propellers and applied a few daubs of Goop.
I’m always ready to fly.
Gallery Changes. Meanwhile, I’ve done lots of work on a new Ups & Downs photo gallery.
It’s robust new software, replacing the lashed-up system I was using before.
Best new features: slideshows and searches. And it’s an industrial-strength system, so I can load it with lots of albums and photos.
I’m leaving the old photo albums in place, since this site and others link to many of those pictures, but all new photos will appear in the new Galleries section.
For now, I’ve copied December and January albums over to the new Galleries. Within the next week or so, I’ll add the most popular albums (BBOB, Hawk Release and more) to the new Galleries section.
For the time being, you’ll see some weirdnesses in the new gallery — wrong dates, particularly — but I’m working on it whenever I have a few minutes.
Tags: Airplanes, Baylands, Combat, Crashes, Flying, People, Radio Control, Wind, Wings.
January 19th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Wow, law is hard!
I can see both sides of the ‘forced landing’ issue. In general, if you can recover to controlled flight after contact, and your opponent cannot (hits the ground, for example) you get a kill.
While it’s true I was able to recover, it was only for long enough to nurse my monoblade-propped plane back to home base (okay, I did catch it. That’s style points, but no substance). I just don’t think that should count, if for no other reason than the lack of effective throttle range. It sounded awful, and clearly could not continue.
So. My suggestion for such circumstances: if it’s in doubt whether the plane could continue, it’s up to the pilot to declare one way or the other.
In that particular case, I’m saying my plane was crippled and therefore I cannot collect a kill.
January 20th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
I like Dave’s idea that if a pilot declares that he was killed, it counts as a kill. Also, if a plane eventually goes down because of a collision, I think it should count as a kill. If a plane is injured can keep flying, it is not killed. However, if it is limping around it should be easy to kill.
I think you want the criteria to be as objective as possible and forced landing or not is more objective and easy to determine than setting a time limit and trying to monitor that.
Party on,
Doug
January 24th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
“Easy to kill” …? Doug, you need to get one of these things in the air! Even when they’re just standing still they’re harder than bejeezus to hit!
February 1st, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Just wanted to officially record today’s kill — I got Pete cold. Though as usual, I think my plane sustained more damage (might have a servo problem). But it was a good smack in a day of several good smacks.
The award of the day goes to Pete’s recovery from an earlier hard, hard hit that sent us both spinning. I got lucky and was pushed up (easier to recover). But Pete was cartwheeling toward the dirt, untangled his spin and pulled it out right on the deck. Dusted off some grass blades, but stayed alive. Spectacular reactions!