[generalbrando]

My students set out today to make sure that it was possible to make the ball fly as far as we wanted. I'm sure we're not the first, but here's their work in video form (1.6 MB).

Basically we just hooked up a small CIM to a controller set so that we could control the speed. Then, in compelte disregard of safety, we pushed the wheel to full speed.

That's the 12.5" pneumatic wheel from the 2004 kit. It was spinning at an estimated 3000 rpm. The motor doesn't actually take that long to reach full speed. We were letting it ease into the high speed because we didn't machine the setup, so it wasn't best to test all limits.

Most of the force going into the ball is provided by the inertia of the wheel - not the motor. The motor loses speed after firing the ball, though it doesn't take much time to recover.

We know this is faster than 12 M/S (estimated 20 M/S based on slow-mo frame counts), but at least now we have a problem of going to fast rather than too slow.