Future of 15m

On Saturday, December 2, 2017 at 3:47:41 PM UTC-5, John Foster wrote:
With the rise in popularity of 18m soaring, what do you guys think will be the future of 15m? Are there enough advantages of 15m over 18m for it to continue to have a strong place in competition? It seems most manufacturers are now making 18m sailplanes, that can be converted to 15m, but they primarily start or come as 18m now. Thoughts?

15 Meter class has lots of competitive gliders at what many see as reasonable cost. Values are pretty stable.
My opinion is that they give a great deal of performance while being convenient to own and fly. Assembling my '29 takes almost twice as long and is a lot more effort than my '27 was. It also cost me 66% more than my '27 and the hull portion of my insurance is proportionately higher.
The 18's built now have 2 piece wings to make the trailers shorter and the weight and bulk of the wings less. The break point can easily be put where it is practical to provide compromise 15M tips. The bigger span has the benefit of keeping span loading reasonable when the engine that 80% of new buyers want is installed.
When asked the question I always suggest 15 vs 18 from a balanced perspective.
That said, I love my '29.
With the large number of good ships available at reasonable(your view may differ) cost, I expect 15M will be around a long time.
FWIW
UH

There are many places where I have flown cross-country where landing out in a 15m ship is a much easier proposition than anything 18m or larger. Many desert or farm strips are designed for crop-dusters or Cessnas. Here in the desert Southwest, conditions are also strong most of the time so that there are few benefits of longer wings.

If you want longer wings, better get a (reliable) engine!

Mike

Yes, reliable engines: that would be nice. Unfortunately no
motor gliders have Honda engines; second best might be a
Stemme with a proper 4 stroke?
However the Stemme (S10) is something of a heavy weight
with handling to match: enjoyable yes, capable yes, but if you
could choose to fly a modern 15m or the Stemme you'd choose
the 15m if handling pleasure mattered to you.
I hope the 15m class has a future; I think it's one problem is
wing loading when an engine is on board - hence all the
18m/20m/21m/25m stuff with engines. So you just need to be
a purist and fly "proper" gliders, I used to do this and it is
great up until the moment you have to put your sparkly new
$100K+ carbon fibre ship into an unknown field or some dirt
strip in the middle of a desert. Then you can suddenly
understand why most of those new German ships are bought
with engines.....

As any owner will tell you: there is no such thing as a reliable
motor glider, absolutely all their engines can be guaranteed to
work sometimes, often when you actually need them

Dave