...things i'd change about the tako...

...i love sailing the tako 3, but if i were to pick a feature which was misimplemented to change, i'd eliminate automatic chat controls for sheet angles entirely, to match the strictly-manual control mechanism for the spinnaker, which is i think a much more realistic experience in not being readily automated and tweakable to the Nth degree...
...actually the way i'd probably do it is to allow coarse and fine controls for both the mainsheet and the spinnaker, at +-5 and +-1, but not through chat commands where people could game the system with complex gestures, so instead they'd have to manually let out mainsheet or pull in spinnaker to increase their angles, and vice versa...

...it would certainly change a lot about racing the experience...

I don't agree. For racing RL sailboats, it is standard practice to mark the sheets so that you can consistently put the jib in the close-hauled-for-going-upwind position (for example). For sailing upwind, you generally want to get the sails in the proper position, then concentrate on steering the boat to the optimal angle, and the gesture trick lets you do that. When I first discovered a gesture to get the sail consistently close hauled (sheet 90, sheet -70) it felt ljust like what we did on all the boats I have raced in RL (an upwind preset/mark on the sheets). We also did lots of minor tweaking of the sail angle in RL racing... it is standard RL sailing practice to take sheets in or out an inch, since with identical boats, the only ways to get ahead are to concentrate on getting the last 2% out of the boat and think tactically.

I do like the spinnaker being unruly in the current version of the tako, since RL spinnakers generally are beasts... but adding one more thing to contend with when going upwind would not be my choice. You are already trying to pick which tack to be on, looking out for starboard tack boats who have right of way, and complicating this situation further would not be my choice.

...it'd surely be much more challenging for a single-skipper boat to handle everything on-the-fly, but with +-5/+-1 controls one could still fine-tune the sheet an inch at time...the main difference i see, which better reflects my own RL solo experiences although admittedly i've never raced, is that one wouldn't be able to round a buoy from a 35 to a 160 degree wind angle, for example, and simply tap a single key to automatically pop the sail to exactly 80 degrees with no more than split-second delay, never missing a beat from all the other rigors of handling the rudder, spinnaker, keeping an eye out for other boats, etcet...

...crewed boats are very different, obviously, but i've never sailied a small boat which could be handled with this degree of automation; it's always taken a moment's attention to actually let out or pull in the sheet and then fine-trim as i go...

Some of the things I would change about the Tako 3:

1. The 30 minute timeout for race wind settings. This is where you have to wait 30 minutes after leaving the vicinity of a windsetter to manually change the settings (in practice mode). Why not just lock in the race wind when the boat crosses the line at the start, and then unlock it when the boat crosses at the finish?
   
   
2. The sheet controls for the spinnaker are backwards from what they should be. Someone screwed the pooch on that one. But it's probably too late to change them now.
   
   
3. With 1.9 coming out any day now, wouldn't it be cool to have controls that turn your camera left, right, and backwards at the touch of a button? Or 40 meters directly overhead, looking straight down?
   
   
4. It would be nice to have the race time ticking on the HUD, both before and during a race.
   
   
5. The instructions seem to be unnecessarily wordy, almost like someone was intentionally trying to make the Tako seem more confusing than it really is.
   
   
6. I wish the race wind and new sail algorithms were documented somewhere, like on the LSL Wiki, or in the instructions notecard.
   

...i've lamented this very fact to race organisers, that it would be nice to have a chat repeater in the outer vicinities of the start lines to assist better facilitate clean starts...their response has been that not knowing the timer status is more realistic, and if one really wants to implement better timing, one should use a separate stopwatch, just like in RL...

...that's all fine and well, but wouldn't virtual stopwatch provide much better usability while interacting with a virtual world, given our already-limited situational awareness?..

...i suppose the same thing could be argued for automated sheet controls, and in fact already has, but they still seem far too automated by comparison to my own RL experiences - maybe i was just a clumsy skipper...

...i've never sailed with a real spinnaker, so i could have this all backwards, but once i wrapped my head around the way things seem set up the current controls felt very intuitive to me - you let out rope to increase mainsail angle, but you pull in rope to increase spinnaker angle...it makes sense to me that they'd be opposite of each other, even if it feels a bit counterintuitive to the uninitiated at first...

...so am i totally wrong about how a spinnaker's angle is rigged in RL?..

If you pretend that the control for the spinnaker is pulling or easing the spinnaker pole, then it makes sense. Pull the pole back (toward the stern of the boat) to increase the sail angle... it works the way it would in RL. In sailing technical jargon you are actually controlling the "guy" for the spinaker pole rather than the spinaker "sheet". Given the limited number of controls we can hace, this was a good choice.

it really truely is that way in RL. The trick I use in SL is to count one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two, etc. and I get good starts often enough that way. Since I am very interested in large fleet sailing in SL, I'm concerned about more chat clutter and since starts are half the race, leaving it to each skipper to solve this problem keeps things more interesting, I think.

I think I see what the problem might be here. If the SL wind is set to not vary much, I can see people setting up gestures to hit exactly the optimal sail angle when the turn onto a broad reach. There is a simple way to fix this. Event organizers could change the windsetter between races and/or have the windsetter vary over a large range of directions. I generally change the wind settings between races, and set the wind direction to vary +-30 (or more) degrees. Changing the mean wind direction between races would also help... I'll start doing that as well. This sort of thing (wind shifts) is very much in the spirit of RL sailing.

So go ahead and program gestures... at my events the wind is going to shift between races and you will need to make adjustments

...what about adding a stopwatch feature to the tako HUD, no chat traffic involved?..

I like this idea. Who wants to make a simple HUD stopwatch, if I give them a modifiable timer?

I'm not a good scripter but I have been messing around with HUD countdown timer. I'm really tired of my poor starts because I keep misjudging the countdown. So I'll be willing to take a crack at it.

Let me know if I can help.