Tester box

[neevel]

Well, you may still have to deal with a new foil point . The design proposals I know of incorporate a 2-3 mm travel (i.e., has to get pushed in that far to light) and possibly a pressure spring of up to 1000 g weight-equivalent. This wouldn't make flicks impossible (ask any good epeeist), but they would be a much lower-percentage shot. A prototype was shown at the '99 FIE congress, with adoption to be voted on at the 2000 congress in December.

The reasoning behind not going with the longer debounce time was that if you were to make it long enough to reject a significant percentage of flicks it would also reject a lot of straight hits, too.

Of course, all this could go the way the rule about the mask bib being valid target in foil did .

-Dave

[darius]

I imagine that a 1kg spring would keep a lot of straight hits from registering, too, just like the 10ms timing.

How would a 2-3mm travel keep flicks from going off, if the pressure to hit is the same?

Whatever happened to changing the lockout time to 350ms? That would help with the real problem - people just charging down the strip with their bells behind their head and finishing with a flick, by making a well-timed stop hit more effective.

darius

[neevel]

The 350 ms is a done deal-- new scoring machines like the Eigertek already incorporate it. We've been using an Eigertek set to 350 ms at my club for 4 months now-- it does give you a better chance against long, winding preparations, but you can't simply 'time-out' a decently executed flick attack or riposte with a straight thrust (which is as it should be-- foil is still a right-of-way weapon).

How the travel would affect a flick depends on where the flick was directed and how it was delivered. For hits to the top of the shoulder, flank and near portion of the lumbar, or the far front of the torso I can 'drop' in a hit that will still set and stick enough that a 2-mm travel wouldn't cause problems. What the FIE is looking to limit are the extreme, crack-the-whip type of hits that rely soley on the flexion of the blade to bring the tip (often just the edge of the tip) into contact with the target for a brief instant at the limit of the blade's bend, just before it snaps back. Under such circumstances it's unlikely that you'd be able to depress the tip far enough to get a light. Try making flick hits with an epee that has a relatively light flexible blade (such as a Leon Paul) to get a sense of what it would be like. As I said, it won't be impossible, just more difficult-- you should still be able to hit 'near' target sections with reliability, but it'll be much tougher to land a flick on the L3 vertebra from over the shoulder unless your opponent is really leaning over.

-Dave Neevel

[azfencer]

What do you mean when you say the 350ms is a done deal? Is it used at the NAC level? Most of us locally use older boxes which I'm sure haven't changed. Does it make much difference and is it required at any level? Can you give any more information about this?

[neevel]

It's in the specs for FIE boxes. I don't think there's a firmware update for the SG-12 yet (there wasn't the last time I asked Amanda at BG about it). I assume the USFA will update the NAC boxes when it's convenient to-- maybe on a rolling basis over several NACs (to do them all at once would probably require Ron Herman to collect them from storage in Iowa between NACs and swap out all the PROMs himself).

It's not an enormous difference (nobody at my club has started winning more bouts just because they use the new machine), it just forces you to be more careful about preparations. It also makes getting into a jabfest of remises riskier-- where before you'd likely get two lights and the ref would just say "I can't tell", now your liable to get only one light on.

Everyone else will just keep on using scoring machines out there-- they won't be made illegal to use at tournaments any more than it's illegal to use non-FIE boxes currently.

-Dave