It was great day, beautiful fall weather on a super field, Brad LaPoints' farm near Dresden.

There were 11 combat entries, pretty good by modern standards, including the usual pros, plus the return of Bill Trumbel, several scale, stunt and racing pilots upgrading to "fighter status" and junior contestant Dan Birks.  There were 22 matches, the same number as in full double elim.

Under the "4 round" format, everybody flys 4 matches for points, win or lose.  Thus the "losers" don't have just one or two flights for their effort and the winners don't use up 5-to-8 matches worth of planes.

The ultimate winner was (not surprisingly) Ivan MacKenzie, with 8 cuts and most of the available 16 minutes of airtime.   

We did not offer the bonus for a "clean" match, just cuts and airtime.  We figured that a collision or line tangle robs you of airtime and gives up the ability to score cuts.  So why rub it in with a 200-point penalty to boot?

Unlike other 4-rounders, we flew the first three rounds by random draw and only matched "close scores" in the 4th and final match. 

For the new young guys in the world of combat there was a demonstation of a SuperTigre G21 spitting out a crankshaft.  Who says there's no new blood in combat? The majority of those in attendance hadn't seen it before.  Time flys.

One glaring defect in the "points combat" system is the lack of DEFENSE.   A scoring system that rewards only the most points scored gives no incentive to defend your streamer.  Thus, in the later rounds, 3 and even 4 cuts were yielded.   This loophole needs to be plugged.  Suggestions include:

Giving points only for the net difference in cuts.
Giving 100 for scoring a cut, but lose 50 for giving one up.
A bonus for scoring more points (winning) the match.

The system was well-liked by most people, except for the issue of defense.

The engines included one Fox 36 Mark IV, one ST G21/35, one Brodak 25, and all the rest OS/Thunder Tigre/GP/Magnum 25's.

Film at eleven.

Hey Paul:

Great report, and you get it out soooo fast!   I really liked the event, and getting 4 flights out instead of my usual predictable 2.  It is good to have a finite number of rounds per person and no annoying reflights.  You know that you will not need anymore than 4 wings and also how long the event will go into the day.

Maybe the answer is to assess a 50 point penalty for giving up cuts, but in a way it fights the theme of a kinder, gentler combat event.  I will go for anything that will discourage sandbagging (and by sanbagging I mean P E T E R  the C H E A T E R  ... Ha, Ha,).   Maybe we should not disclose the points standings to anyone until the very end of the day either, to further discourage collusion strategizing.  

Nevertheless it was a lot of fun and thanks again to Brad for having us

Regards

STunt S.

  I will go for anything that will discourage sandbagging (and by sanbagging I mean P E T E R  the C H E A T E R  ... Ha, Ha,).   

Hmm,

    Looked like you learned a thing or two from Peter when you did the same thing in your next match against Steve "The Batman" Kott 

   

Pat MacKenzie

Our local rules award points to the match winner, and limit each pilot to 3 point-scoring cuts per round. This seems to motivate pilots to fly defense when needed to get the win. There are not many 3-3 ties, or 3-2 wins. More often matches are decided by a cut or two, or end in a draw.

-Chris

We fly four or five rounds and the placing is on won-lost record, not total points.  So that puts defense back and makes it not just a streamer-tow.  Usually we use round five to fly off any ties in W-L record for first thru fourth.  We have also used total cuts as the tie-breaker.

Looks like the guys Ivan flew needed to fly MUCH better defense.  They gave up too many cuts.  Giving up cuts is no strategy to win, overall.  How many did Ivan "give up"?  The clean match bonus especially does its thing late in a match, when one plane may be towing only 6 inches of streamer and the other streamer is gone.  If the guy chasing the 6 in. really needs another cut both flyers will be very careful.  If the penalty for chasing too hard and having a midair is only losing 30-40 sec. of airtime it is still worth the risk.

You can add a winner of the match bonus.  It just spreads the scores sooner and makes the guy with a couple of wins a target for a midair.

Can't see what giving a 50 pt penalty for losing a cut does except make the cut worth 150 pts.

Matching all the rounds by points makes the best flyers fly each other and minimizes luck of the draw.  If you have a wide skill range among the pilots random drawing more than the first round gives one pilot more opportunities to draw high scoring matches while the other guys have to tough it out flying Ivan.

Glad y'all had fun, especially the not-so-die-hard combat flyers.
I'm thinking about trying a "reverse" score ala' wrestling, or maybe giving some nominal points, say 5 or 10, for hitting the streamer without getting a cut.  The reverse would be 10 or 20 pts for shaking the other guy off and getting behind him.

It is a lot of fun when the fourth round starts with half the contestants within 2 cuts of the top flyer.  Then the two high scorers have to go against each other knowing they can't play around, but have to score some cuts, and if either one lets the other guy get a cut he'll be way down, and a midair is a near death sentence.

What are you talking about when you say lack of defense?  Just flying level and trying to trade cuts?  The scores don't show many cuts if people weren't trying to not get cut.  Before we went to limiting cuts to three we had several contest over 2-3 years where several pilots had 10 to as many as 14 cuts(in 4 matches).  Even then, the high cut count usually came from one match where they were able to rack up 5-6 cuts on one hapless novice.