RCP 2021-014

MARC MCREYNOLDS said : subscriber Report 10 months ago

The NAR Mission Points Worksheet was the result of a lot of effort by the scale modeling community to come up equitable and somewhat consistent points awarding from what had been just an undefined points basket.  It spells out how points awarded within each category should account for difficulty and realism, rather than simply applying the same number to anything.

This RCP would take us back to, for example:  Simple direct staging of a sounding rocket entry receiving as many points as an entry risking a realistic "stage separation + delayed upper-stage ignition" flight profile;  No points at all for drogue followed by main chute deployment from a Mercury capsule;  The same 50 points for a gliding (in the loosest sense of the term : ) Estes Space Shuttle orbiter as for a radio-controlled orbiter performing realistic descent maneuvers.

I do support eliminating points for some of the more fanciful "mission" claims which have become acceptable over the years:  "My WayHi altimeter emulates radar tracking of the sounding rocket... or telemetry from it... or whatever.  Don't care -- just give me the fifteen points".  But that situation should be handled by an RCP which addresses it specifically, rather than undoing the progress made with the Mission Points Worksheet.

MARK B. BUNDICK said : subscriber Report 10 months ago

Current FAI (S7) rules make no effort to break down flight points for anything:

"Flight, characteristics: 300 points maximum. To be judged on launch, stability of flight, motors and descent. A competitor has to designate which operations his models are to perform in flight (eg separation of powered portions; radio controlled trajectory; ejection of payload, etc)."

While I agree that some general guidelines for awarding flight points will help insure some consistency in judging, tightly restricting them seems a bit much.

Guy Gehlhausen said : subscriber Report 10 months ago

This RCP should not be enacted in its current form. Limiting mission point categories to only four would stifle creativity and innovation, as well as limit interest in the event. With that said, I do agree in concept that some careful rethinking and refinement of the mission points rule. 

 

CHAD RING said : editor Report 11 months ago

 

Agree with Bob Zurek, this RCP is way too 'cookie cutter' and limiting.

A better approach would be for author to amend proposal and have all mission points in all craftsmanship events return to 100 max.  This is how it used to be, like 20 years ago or so.  This allows for mission to be open to many things, but lessens the impact, or points swing that it can have, and relies on a very good static score to be able to take a top place.

 

Robert Zurek said : subscriber Report 12 months ago

I am assuming the author meant to reference section 50.10.1.5 as 50.10.6 does not exist in the July 2021 sporting code.

I understand the desire to compartmentalize and standardize the points awarded, but how does this proposal deal with mission characteristics that do not fall into the 4 buckets of Clustering, Staging, Jettison, and Gliding?

This would not give guidance for realistic mission characteristics such as thrust vectoring, dynamic surface control, operation of electronic payloads, complex realistic recovery, etc.

It would seem that there should at least be some point limited bucket to deal with new features that someone may come up with in the future.