[Archers] Pennsic

[Siegfried]

> I have given brief thought to the numbers. If you have 8 stations, teams
> of four, and it takes a team 1.5 hours to shoot, and you want the
> shooting to take no more than 4 hours so you can setup/takedown in one
> day, you cannot manage more than 70 or so archers, tops. There is just
> no feasible means of holding an open populace shoot at Pennsic, in
> addition to the one already in place.

Just a thought:  I think that an open populace shoot CAN be done.  It
just takes a little extra planning and careful forethought.

Some random number-murmering ...

Your 1.5hr for 8 stations, means 11.5 minutes per station.  That's a
long time.

Assuming the stations are setup in sequence, and each station has a
marshal to 'keep it moving'.   There's no reason that a station should
take longer than 5 minutes to shoot.  A minute to shoot it, 4 to
retrieve/score/move on ... (maybe 6-7 minutes depending)

When I plan shoots, I often dry run them, to see how long each one
takes, to make sure that I didn't design something that takes longer
than that to actually make it through.

At that point, 8 shoots, 5 minutes each is only 40 minutes.

To accomplish this the REAL trick, is again making sure that no shoot
will become a bottleneck, and that all shoots can be shot concurrently.
 So literally it just becomes a straight line course that everyone is
sent through, with a waiting line to enter.

Let's assume for discussion that it really takes 60 minutes, with an
average of 7.5 minutes per station.

At this point, if you ran it for 4 hours, you'd be able to have one
team-of-four enter every 7.5 minutes, except during the last hour when
everyone is finishing up. ok, so that's 96 archers.  Not that much more :)

But, there are ways to also consider getting more people in there.

1) Run it longer.  Every hour longer you run it, can fit 32 more
archers.  Given this is at Pennsic, and has everyone captive.  I don't
see a reason (resources of marshals aside) to not run this for 6 or 8 hours.

2) Allow more than 'teams of 4' to go through.  If you can setup the
ranges to allow 8 to shoot at once.  Or 6 (2 teams of 3).  Or do away w/
the team idea and just have 5/6/7/8 people on the line.  You
dramatically increase throughput.

3) Have less targets  (Granted, that comes at a cost)

4) Design drastically quicker targets.   It's possible to design shoots
w/ multiple stations that take TINY amounts of time to shoot.  I've been
at a woodswalk where we did like 10 stations in 30 minutes.   The trick
is just to make sure that all stations, while challenging and fun, are
as simple/quick to shoot as possible.
   IE, design all shoots (or most) to only be '2 arrows'.  (I dislike 1
arrow shoots, give someone a second chance *grin*).  And make shoots
dead-simple to score.  Either a hit/miss, or basic killzone concepts.
Getting into weird 'hit this X times to hit that Y times to then go back
and ...' ... take forever to score when someone gets 14 arrows off, and
then they 'maybe' broke a line or not, and then, etc.
   This does also mean removing any target concepts that involve
'resetting' things, unless the reset just takes a second (standing back
up a couple targets in a line (Seamus Ogre Head Style)) ... and probably
doing away w/ any speed rounds, or having them also shorter.

That being said, the woodswalk I did that went quick, and that was 2
shots per target ... was amazing fun.  They had a theme that went with
it as well, in that you were always shooting things where you only had 2
chances.  A deer running away, or a baddie running towards you ;)  etc.


In any case, I'd love to see Atlantia, if we do this, make it open to
anyone, everyone, to come shoot.   If we get overwhelmed with attendees,
then awesome, we did our job, we showed (at least the early arrivers) a
good time, and we showed that there is appeal for such a shoot.  It
gives more grounds the NEXT year to expand it.

I worry if we restrict this, by it's design, to a 70 person shoot ... I
think it may fail at your original goal.   Part o the goal was to have a
shoot whereby Atlantia's 30-40 'excellent archers' who can't make the
Champions Team, get a chance to shoot in a good competition.  But wait,
if Atlantia can field 30-40, so can AEthelmearc, and East, and Mid ...
and Ealdormere can bring a dozen, and ....

Suddenly you need to support more like 150, just to meet your goal. :)

Anyway, food for thought.   I love the idea of this going forward, and
will support however I can (though my time *AT* Pennsic may be limited)

Siegfried


-- 
Barun Siegfried Sebastian Faust - Barony of Highland Foorde - Atlantia
http://hf.atlantia.sca.org/ - http://crossbows.biz/ - http://eliw.com/