I've thought about that problem. You could have 60 people if it was a 3.3km loop. Half shoot after 3.3, other half shoot after 6.6 and then everyone shoots at 10, 13.3 and 16.6.
I know things a terrible idea, I just really really hate watching the individual.
Also love the idea of someone having a 2 minute lead on final shoot and their face when they know they have to ski an extra 600 or 900m when they meltdown in the range.
I think there are two main problems with televising the individual. The first is that we often don't see much of the trails at all, besides in the first few minutes before the range gets busy, and the last few minutes when the final relevant starters are going through and most of the results sheet is set. The second is that the camera crews are often a little slow to pick up who out of shooters who aren't clear are relevant.
The 2021 World Championships Women's Individual is a key case in point; the cameras spent the vast majority of the race following Hanna Öberg, Lisa Theresa Hauser and Dorothea Wierer around, because they started with clean shooting and decently strong skiing, but of those only Öberg ended up on the podium, thanks to Hauser and Wierer both missing 2 targets in the back 10. It took them until her final shoot to notice Davidová was still on a perfect score, because she was largely shooting at around the same time as Öberg, starting eight and a half minutes behind her and winning with 20/20 in 42'27, so almost exactly eight and a half minutes per lap. Even worse, Tandrevold who got bronze wasn't picked up until she'd already left the final shoot, because she missed at the first visit to the range so hadn't popped up as being near the top on any of the timing screens even though she was only a minute down because of that early miss, so as others missed late on, she came back into contention.
I don't know if maybe they would need to create some better gaps between contenders in order to allow a bit more time for things to breathe, similar to how they stagger the big guns with lower qualifiers between them in the XC individual starts, as otherwise, especially when there is a particularly desirable part of the startlist, you end up with all the big guns clustered together on the startlist, and the range gets very hectic, leading to contender after contender being in the range together and the cameras just flitting between different athletes in the range.
As for the point on athletes needing to ski an extra 900m or what have you... I do think, however, we might be due the men doing a 200m penalty loop. The women's competition has far wider variety between the strongest skiers and the best shooters rather than having one or two teams completely bogart the top 10 if they get the skis right; the men ski further in all but the SMR and Mixed Relay, and it takes them less time to complete the penalty loop on average, so the penalty for missing a target is noticeably less than in the women's races.
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