been building tracks for our local club for about two years now and we finally got access to a warehouse space on weekends. the ceilings are maybe 6 meters and the floor is like 40x20m which sounds big but once you start laying out gates it gets tight real fast

my question is basically how do you guys handle gate spacing when youre limited on space but still want the track to feel like a real race and not just a parking lot slalom. ive been doing about 8-10 meters between gates on straights and like 4-5 on the technical sections but some of the faster guys in the club are complaining that theres no room to carry speed out of corners. i get it but im also trying to make it accessible for the mid-tier pilots too

also wondering if anyone has opinions on gate height for indoor, were currently running all gates at about 1.5m which might be too low for anyone pushing real speed

yeah indoor track design is genuinely hard to get right. the thing nobody tells you is that tight tracks arent necessarily beginner friendly, they just feel that way. a pilot who cant carry speed through a corner is going to struggle more in a 4m gap than in a 7m gap because the margin for a bad line is so small

for the spacing i usually think about it in terms of what gates are doing ? if two gates are back to back and forcing a direction change thats your technical section and 4-5m is fine, but if youre trying to build a flowing section where people can actually throttle up then you need closer to 10-12m minimum or it just becomes brake-brake-brake which isnt fun to fly or watch

gate height at 1.5m indoors is honestly pretty standard, some people go up to 1.8m but then you start risking prop wash bouncing off the ceiling in weird ways on taller spaces. id leave it where you are unless pilots are consistently clipping the top

we had the same problem at our venue, ended up just asking the fastest guy in the group to walk the track before we finalized anything. sounds obvious but it made a huge difference because he immediately pointed out like three spots where the natural exit angle from a gate was sending you straight into a wall or another gate at a bad angle

also we started using those cheaper SJ foam gates for indoor instead of anything rigid, so when someone does stuff a gate at speed the whole thing just bounces and doesnt wreck the quad as badly. probably not a revolutionary tip but saved us a few frames