Marc Gellart wrote: Hey Tony E., you are wrong about the largest ship to win the Nats. It was DP with his Insanity, 3.7M.
====================== Yeah, I know. I didn't say the PP was the biggest. I just said it was the current WC and Nats Champ, and that it was 140", and that planes were getting pretty big, and I fancied an arms race that would end with everybody flying planes as big as a Schweitzer 1-26. The ensuing deluge of posts has explored this from many angles. Now one remedy du jour that's proposed is a resistor in series with the winch motor. Whatever the various merits or demerits of this idea, by golly, it would definitely make designers aim for an optimal balance between launch performance and glide performance, just as they have done in F3B. If the resistor was large enough (enough ohms, that is), we could go back to 200# line or even lighter. However, I have 2 PPs and I would be sad if CDs adopted a resistor whose value was so great that I couldn't get a good launch.
