Couldn't wait ; So this distance stuff has been implemented.

Actually it had a few positive side-effects.

It took out an correlation between the spi hit and the heeling/righting (overpowered) compensation. The effect of this in the old system was neglectable but still it is nice to have made them fully independent.

Another side effect is that the spi hit is now defined in the ACTUAL speeding up that a boat experiences on a downwind leg when adding a spi. This solves the "how can a spi boat only get such a small hit" issue for ever. The current hit is that a cat is 25 % faster under spi than the same boat without a spi on the same downwind leg. The expected tweaking in the near future may adjust this hit a little bit but this sure feels more real than 4 % already, doesn't it ?

So distance racing guys. The things you want to see in a handicap system are now available as well. No more "100 % upwind sailing with a spi hit while the other ..." blues anymore. If the race is all upwind with tacking than the spi hit is not excersized. Only thing the race organisers need to do is type in "100%" in the input field called (ratio upwind work) and all ratings are compensated. Spi hit is gone and heeling/righting compensation is taken over 100 % upwind work.

With regard to these (one-way) distance races I dare state while standing on solid ground that NO other rating system even approaches the accuracy of the NMBR system.

Note : All ratio's imaginable for "portion upwind", "portion downwind", "portion reaching" can be entered as long as the three added up result in 100 %. This means that all and any race course shape can be accurately rated under NMBR by having it produce custom numbers for your race.

I'm actually quite pleased with this version 7 of the NMBR-system myself.

Expanding the system took only 60 minutes and that was because I couldn't find a typo that stuffed things up. It convinced myself of how good the basic framework really is. It is definately the most flexible system available, by far.
And it does exactly what you expect it to do. Even more so, the framework is not even that high tech. One could explain its internals to a novice on the back of a local diner napkin.

Now lets see if we can get this NMBR show on the water !

Regards,

Wouter