
Post by
YourMomSA | 2020-06-30 | 15:37:35
If you click on the "User Manual" button in the dashboard, it'll give you a lot of additional useful information.
ERT is limited in the data available to it. It doesn't (and can't) run a routing in Zezo to actually estimate your arrival time. It just checks how far you've sailed (total distance, not distance made good), calculates your average speed so far, and assumes you'll sail that speed straight to the finish. So... extremely inaccurate in some cases, but still useful for a very rough estimate.
If the game had an accurate DTF from the start available to the Dashboard, then it could use an average VMG-to-date for the calculation instead, but that data isn't available (at least not anything accurate), so it can't. That wouldn't help all that much with accuracy, though, anyway, because any time the conditions are faster later in the race than what you've sailed thus far, or vice-versa, the ERT will be wrong.
I find it to be a useful tool for comparison to other boats that started within a couple hours from me, to see how we're doing relative to each other... assuming we haven't sailed dramatically different courses... but you can't count on it for a reliable estimate of your actual finish time, nor for comparison to boats with highly different start times.