[Basel A]

Loving the discussion going on here so far!

Originally Posted by Chris is me

Based on some experience I've had with single wheel shooters this year, I think this is a really poor assumption. Shooter performance really seems to change a lot with more torque in the system - a world of difference between a mini-CIM versus two mini-CIMs in our shooter's performance for example. This seems to suggest the work being done by the motors while the shooter is under load helps keep the shooter up to speed. Now, how to account for this work in the model for a generic shooter is beyond me. I feel like this is a constant or series of constants that would have to be empirically derived.

This has been my experience as well.

There are a couple approaches that can be taken here. The method mentioned by Thaddeus above (Energy = Force x Distance) has a severe flaw in that it assumes the motor will only rotate the arc of the wheel path. However, because of the speed difference between the wheel and the ball, the wheel is absolutely going to slip, possibly for many revolutions, before it has matched speeds with the ball. One way to account for that is to determine the force during slip and measure the revolutions it takes for the wheel to stop slipping on the ball.

The approach I would take, and this is only marginally more feasible, is to look at the power output of the motor and subtract the amount of power going into the unloaded mechanical system. Then you can measure the amount of time it takes for the ball to enter and leave the shooter. Energy = Power x Time. This must be done empirically as well, but a system model could be developed to determine the power going into the unloaded system as a function of speed. A back of envelope calculation we performed midseason using this method suggested that the motors provided a comparable amount of energy to the ball during shooting as did the initial kinetic energy of the system (using the numbers from our shooter).