This is an earlier experiment. Read the amendments below before treating its findings as current.
The question
With the measuring yardstick now fixable, is the loss driven by the extra room growing with speed, or by the aircraft's limited agility?
What was tested
Two new switches (off by default) held the reference spacing fixed. First, a wing with double horizontal acceleration flew against the ordinary wing's spacing. Second, a 22 m/s wing got extra room sized for 16 m/s. Three layouts each.
What was found then
Double acceleration cut collisions at 22 m/s to about two-thirds (47 against 70), with close meetings nearly unchanged (1.06×). Room sized for 16 m/s made no material difference (73 against 70; not a formal test of sameness). At the same 37 m reference spacing, a 22 m/s wing still collided about five times as often as a 16 m/s one. No tested room setting flattens the growth. A slow, agility-limited aircraft flown faster fits the evidence, but is not proven. Capping the room's growth was not recommended.
What we learned later
Reviewers qualified the elevenfold growth in close meetings: it counts entries into a zone that grows with speed, not an independently measured rate at which aircraft meet.
research/design/tau_slope_answer.md §2.1
What changed
nothing (two measurement switches left in the controller, off by default)
Corrections retained in the record
Earlier wording: doubling the wing's turning authority
Record correction: The test doubled the horizontal acceleration limit. The wing's separate sideways (turn) limit never binds and had been shown inert.
research/data/oos/tau_authpin.md; research/reviews/navigator-c158.md (F-TURN-ALAT-INERT)
Numbers and source references
- 0.66×
- collisions per craft-hour at 22 m/s with double acceleration, spacing heldresearch/data/oos/tau_authpin.md
- 47 vs 70
- collisions, test vs baseline, three seedsresearch/design/tau_slope_answer.md §2.4
- 1.06×
- encounter rate, test vs baselineresearch/data/oos/tau_authpin.md
- 1.05×
- collisions per craft-hour at 22 m/s with 16 m/s-sized spacingresearch/data/oos/tau_lagpin.md
- 73 vs 70
- collisions, test vs baselineresearch/data/oos/tau_lagpin.md
- 37 m
- shared reference radius (37.21 m; the live bubble was 33.21 m)research/data/oos/tau_lagpin.md
- one against five
- collisions per craft-hour, wing at 16 vs 22 m/s at the same reference radius (0.017 vs 0.086)research/design/tau_slope_answer.md §2.6