Talk:3093: Drafting

The efficiency loss is presuamably because the exhaust from the lead rocket is pushing back on the following rocket. It's also really hot, so the follower may be destroyed. Barmar (talk) 15:27, 23 May 2025 (UTC)

Anyone else getting lots of "site is experiencing difficulties" errors Barmar (talk) 15:28, 23 May 2025 (UTC)

Yes. It must be drafting behind another, more powerful rocket-themed web page and was experiencing some of that "99% inefficiency." 172.68.26.136 15:56, 23 May 2025 (UTC)

" getting lots of "site is experiencing difficulties" errors " Yes. --PRR (talk) 16:22, 23 May 2025 (UTC)

Yes. From the experience of another forum I'm in, it's probably a sudden uptick on (possibly AI-feeding?) site-scraping. On that site, a few hundred (when the number of viewers suddenly increased from a few hundred people online, maximum, per day, to tens of thousands. The owner of the site put an additional "are you human" check in the way (after about a week of it), and it fell back to less than a hundred simultaneous connections (not that far off the actual observable user-traffic, with a couple of handfuls of Guest lurkers at any given time).

That site didn't have Cloudflare, unlike here, and didn't use that as a solution. I would have hoped that this would have mitigated it here, though. Possibly, however, things could have already been hundreds of times worse without it as it is, hard to know for sure.

And though my reasoning of the cause is just a guess, I'm sure others have noticed that the amount of 503/Connection Issue responses we're getting has substantially reduced the spam-level numbers of "goes nowhere, does nothing" new accounts that this site tends to get (its other anti-spam protections having long since prevented most of those from doing anything, while still seemingly allowing genuine users to interact). Hard to fully qualify that as a positive, but I suspect that genuinely driven 'honest editors' are more likely to persevere and get past the current bottlenecks, so it might (in certain, rather limited, terms) improve the editing experience. (The other site started to be really hammered (to then prompt calls for its subsequent changes) on 11/May, which seems to me to coincide very closely with the drop in new spam-style account names on here, which seems to corroborate it being the same global issue causing both sites problems.)

Not that I wouldn't appreciate less of the 503s/etc. It definitely is a direct annoyance. Which I can't see being solved any time soon (if Cloudflare doesn't blanket add to its proxying protections, itself). 172.68.229.49 16:34, 23 May 2025 (UTC)

Added notes on difference between friction and expellant propulsion 172.69.212.151 16:14, 23 May 2025 (UTC)

Just a comment about drafting and cycle-sport. It might be used in peletons and certain velodrome events (i.e. not "pursuit" ones). But in my own part of the sport, time-trialling, it is actually not allowed (excepting in team time-trials), as competitors that have just been passed by a faster rider are not supposed to hang on (figuratively, of course) to their wheel. Nor should you try to catch your minute-man just so that you can stick behind them. Also, the rules on the amount of traffic allowed on the roads during an event, as well as being a direct safety aspect on the busiest of roads, are meant to remove any excessive advantage from passing traffic (especially lorries) pushing/pulling the competitors along. This doesn't mean that the occasional ride won't get some assistance. A fast tractor may be too slow for a fast rider to stay behind, who would really need to pass it when safe to do so, but could be going just fast enough for a slower one to benefit (but at the risk of being spotted doing so and the issue addressed appropriately). But competitor-on-competitor co-pacing (or accompanied riding of any other unofficial kind) is definitely a no-no. 172.68.229.49 16:34, 23 May 2025 (UTC)