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Unread 05-02-2006, 18:19
aaronm_k aaronm_k is offline
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Re: Calculating Angle to fire at

Quote:
Originally Posted by varcsscotty
OK! something really funny just happened. I was working on these trajectories and having quite the frustrating time with them....
In walks my brother with the comics section of The Oregonian newspaper. He tells me to read the Foxtrot comic, so I do. And what do I find? I find the Foxtrot dude doing equations to calculate the trajectory of a snowball. That made my day! So I got the equations now...heeheehee
Here's a scan of the comic, with the formula circled:


The equation is not that simple, though, when you want it the other way around, with launch angle in terms of range/target distance. I calculated it as:


Unfortunately, as Hutch noted, spin and air resistance make it almost pointless to try to use a physics function, so you're probably better off with a best-fit polynomial anyway.