Box throwing
 

Just a general question really, whats the furthest any of you teams have been able to throw a box if your design does that, we can get it pretty much across the field but I want to know if there is a way to get it higher across the field.

The only way to throw it very far is to use flywheels, by my calculations anyways.

Greg

Actually our team is using a cannon to launch the boxes across the arena. It's still a little inacurate but were in the process of rifling the barrell.

I still don't get the strategy behind launching boxes.
Does anyone have a strategy you'd like to share?

The reason my team is going for a launcher is that we could steal boxes from our opponents and get them in our scoring zone in a matter of seconds and not have to worry about what"s happening on the ramp. We"re planning on using a catapult with surgical tubing to hold the energy and using motors to tension the tubing. The rest of my team are newbies, and my engineer was skeptical of the stregth of the tubing, so I gave him a bit of a demonstration. Myself and one of my friends held two pieces of surgical tubing tight and another person pushed a crate into them. We launched to box straight up, which broke a cieling tile and bent the metal framework that holds them up.

He will never again question the power of surgical tubing.:D

how much surgical tubing are you using? we were thinking about all of it doubled over a couple times, we can get amazing power out of that now we are just trying to find the perfect angle to power ratio to launch them at



erm well with that we kinda deduced we would hit the human players... LOL gotta change the angle and power some more ;)

By the way i love that pic

luckily we had someone down at the end of the arc to catch it... well have it bounce off of them so they absorb some impact ;) :D

my head hurts now.........

where am I, and how did i get here. the last thingi remember was a glacier colored bin flying at me at a high speed......

my head still hurts....

hey one fell off of a stack and bounced off my head and broke a little piece of when it hit the floor so were both in the head trauma by glacier boxes club :D

we could start a head trauma committe for our team :)

I told you guys we should get helmets, just for testing, but no...

I told you safety glasses wouldn't help against bins...

-Steve

The angle = 45 degrees for max distance.

Greg

Hmmm, two weeks into the build and we"re already having injuries. We were discussing this as a strategy today, but it could also pose a saftey problem.
As it appears there are numerous teams looking at launching crates quite a distance, there is the problem of launching one into the crowd, and with the injuries sustained by people who know a crate is going to come at them, I would hate to see people being surprised by a crate flying at them.

For any projectile, 45º will deliver the most distance for power. If you launch at 45º you can start reducing power for specified distances. If you think you need to change the angle too, do it without changing power. Change one variable at a time to get the most effective results.

yeah thats what ive been figuring im just trying to find an optimum... ya know? :)