Mike,
I'm not a contest guru.
Many pilots in US,including me, think our handicap system is good.
There are almost the same like IGC's, except the weights.
We have this small imaginary guy with small parachute,and little
battery plus new,empty ship in equation.
If a little fellow can not reach ruder pedals, we give him extra few
% handicap.
IGC has max gross, less water in the wings weight(tail water OK).
And many EU countries are using same handicaps for handicapped
contests(with water).
I never heard of 5 ships competing in EU country nationals .If they
have so few ships, they combine classes.We have 5-7 gliders(sometimes
with the filler) competing at nationals all the time.
We could combine and handicap 18 with open, we could combine with
handicaps 15m and standard and same for 1-26 and PW-5's.
We should do it, if less than 18 ships per class show up, in the last
moment, by planning those classes together.
Instead we combine strongest class in the world(club) with all the
gliders .
The sad part is, we name the winner (flying newest 18m glider) of our
combined club with the all gliders, US national champion of club class
on the IGC forum.
Ryszard

On Apr 14, 12:54*pm, Mike the Strike wrote:
We have had some interesting discussions over sailplane handicaps for
our upcoming Arizona contest season and we are unable to reconcile the
difference between the SSA handicaps and those used in the rest of the
world. *There appear to be no clear descriptions anywhere on how the
SSA ones are calculated and there seem a few odd inconsistencies. *We
have rejected the idea that the laws of physics are different on this
side of the pond.

So far, no-one seems to be able to find out how the SSA arrives at
their handicaps - they apparently just appear out of thin air. *It
would be nice if there were some transparency in their calculations so
we can figure out why they are different.

I suggested that we just adopt the European handicaps - the Germans
have especially done a great job and at least we know how they derive
them.

Comments from any of the SSA contest gurus?

Mike