Post by
YourMomSA | 2018-03-22 | 14:30:05
Some thoughts on the points that have come up here...
- Rankings. Per my earlier comment... Just ignore them until the finish. Sometimes weird invisible gates will cause temporary oddities like what we saw yesterday. Other times, the absence of invisible gates where they should be will cause other oddities like the early "leaders" going into the Firth of Thames. Rankings have nothing to do with ETA. They only relate to DTF based on an invisible set of marks and gates that doesn't always make sense. Just try to get to the finish as fast as you can, and let the Rankings sort themselves out when you get there. Instead, keep tabs on boats you consider to be rivals of comparable ability to your own, and see how you're doing against them along whatever strategic line of progression you personally think to be best.
- Different boatspeeds for the same boats with the same sails in the same wind with the same TWA. VR has answered in their FAQ, but people rarely look at the FAQ. When you look at other boats, you aren't seeing their current data. If they look at their own boat, they'll see something different from what you see. It's really annoying... I get pinged a couple times a week in the game by people asking me if I'm cheating, or how I'm going faster than them, etc. Here's the FAQ:
https://virtualregatta.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001502274-Why-is-the-boat-next-to-me-faster-than-my-own-boat-
- Boat's course and/or projection line looking wrong when you first open the game. PARTICULARLY with a slow or cellular connection. Don't touch it immediately. This often just means the game hasn't finished importing all of its data to your device yet. Usually, if I see this and give it 5-10 seconds, I discover that the data import finishes and the boat's course and projection line suddenly correct themselves to what they should have been. It can definitely cause a panic attack, though. Anyway... if you touch it before it updates, that may cause it to view whatever was being shown when you touched it as a desired course change, so it's important to resist the panic.
- With that said... There are scenarios where the scheduler can get confused and do stuff you didn't ask it to do (for example, if you make a bunch of adjustments and then stay logged in to watch it complete a tack, sometimes it will tack back a couple minutes later... This happened to me four times in the last Clipper leg). And sometimes people accidentally set scheduled course changes incorrectly, and think it's a system bug because they didn't realize what they did, and since it doesn't show your scheduler history (unless you're using the Chrome Dashboard), it's easy to think the system screwed up when it was really your own mistake. Anyway... my point is that if you've given it enough time to be confident that the weird course isn't just an internet lag, then DonH's "heads down and get on with it" is the best move.
- Finally, Alex Wind's observation. I think Toppen and I discussed the same thing yesterday. He and I were both sailing TWA 140 for at least 24 hours straight. But for some reason, he moved from a bit North of me to a bit South of me. Part of this could be from him being 1-2 miles ahead, and therefore maybe in a slightly different wind angle. But when I asked him about it, he said I was actually sailing 139.7. He said the Dashboard was confirming him at 140.0 and me at 139.7. I don't use the Dashboard (it seems like a great tool, but I'd over-analyze things if I had that much data), so I'm not sure. I don't know how it's possible for me to have been sailing 139.7. Maybe someone with the Dashboard can do some testing to figure it out.... My guess is that I was sailing a fixed compass course, and then turned on the lock... And it locked in at 139.7 because that was the precise TWA angle based on the precise wind angle when I hit the lock. Whereas if I had used the scheduler to set it to 140, or maybe if I had set the lock and then changed my course manually to 141 and back to 140, or something like that, maybe it would have given my precisely TWA 140. This is all guesswork, though. I'm a little baffled on this one at the moment. But... the bottom line is that if it's true that a boat can be sailing a TWA angle with a decimal, and that different boats can be sailing different decimals, rounded off to the same whole number, then that would explain what I saw and what Alex Wind saw. You'd only notice it when sailing for a long time at a fixed TWA, though.
On that last point, I've also noticed when occasionally trying to sail a fixed compass course of 0, 90, 180, or 270 that the latitude or longitude that I'd ordinarily expect to remain constant until I change course doesn't always do so. So I think there's a similar issue with fixed compass courses where you can actually be sailing 0.3 degrees instead of 0.0. But I similarly don't know how it happens or how to avoid it.
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