Discussion: Course Length

After carefully measuring each leg, I came up with a much shorter course length than the offical distance. Mine measured 7.05 K. How is everyone coming up with 7.39 K? My leg lengths, in order, are as follows: 430, 225, 495, 400, 150, 300, 665, 580, 525, 315, 575, 500, 300, 205, 210, 620, 440, 115.

I think it is easy to lose (or gain) 18 meters per leg (the average difference in
your measurements) just due to measuring error. When I measure courses,
this happens to me sometimes, but more so on 1:15 maps it seems.

Your measurements, compared with the ones listed, per leg, are in this range,
except for legs 7 and 16, where there is a significant difference. I would look at
those legs again. (I don't have the map in front of me).

Also, remember that there was a leg that went thru an out of bounds area (marked
with red slash on my map). You are supposed to measure around that, not thru it --
I don't remember what leg that was on, and remember it being too small an area
to account for 340m of difference, but it is something to check.

Finally, I believe the course setter and the person who did the control descriptions
and final details of the event were different people. It is possible that the courses
were measured before the location of the start triangle was finalized, though this
would only account for at most 100m of error.

Initially, I measured things out and came up short too. Since this is the first one I've put-up on Attack Point, I wasn't sure about a few things. Should the official distance be used or not? Shoud I start the measuring in the middle of the triangle (which I did)? Should I go around the out-of-bounds obstacle from 5-6 (which I didn't)--I measured through instead. I measured through because I had heard that the director made it out-of-bounds at the last moment and probably didn't have time to print-out new control descriptions before the meet. Finally, should use the official run-in distance which was 100m or 120m--it's clearly longer than 100m or 10cm on the map. In the end, I decided to match the official distances available on the map, but had to fudge slightly to get the official total. I didn't have any other official information.

I now have taken another look at the measurements and have adjusted them to reflect what I measured the map to. This time, I took no care to match the official distances. I measured with a long metal ruler, from center of circle to center. I went around the obstacle on the 5-6 leg. The two legs Dave and I differed a lot on were long ones, where if you're using a hand compass, the scale might not of been long enough to do in one measure. One more possibility of the official total distance discrepancy is possible distortion from color copying. It seems that printer set maps weren't used.