Disk tendencies

[Spirator]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

The frisbees are, in essences, a gyroscope. Their spin resists flipping. You can test this by bouncing them off the wall. Most will land upright. However, I would always design for the worst case.

Thrown like a coin, they should tend to land upside down - the solid top and open bottom moves the center of gravity to the top of the frisbee, and without the spin they have nothing to counter balance it.

However, I expect with the coriolis effect of the earth, teams in Australia may find this is all backwards from what they expect. That will make it a very difficult challenge for them.......

We hadn't considered the impact of the Coriolis effect on our shooting. How much of an impact would this have? We're going to Honolulu to compete later this year.

[Mark McLeod]

Originally Posted by Spirator

We hadn't considered the impact of the Coriolis effect on our shooting. How much of an impact would this have? We're going to Honolulu to compete later this year.

Just remember to take your Coriolis effect with you. There's no going back for it later.

[akoscielski3]

When we were testing, the day of kickoff, we threw a frisbee at a wall 50 times, of which 5 landed upside down. Therefore about 90 % were landing right side up. This was throwing at a brick wall, with the frisbee only about 5 feet off the ground.

[F22Rapture]

I was under the impression that the Coriolis effect was almost completely negligible in small-scale systems. Similar to how it isn't actually responsible for water's rotation around a sink or toilet (they're actually designed that way), the curve of a frisbee is almost exclusively determined by the angle it was thrown at, and from which direction.

It's one of those bad, only 1% true explanations that caught hold in popular culture and won't let go. Similar to how it's still taught in lower-level science courses that oil and water don't mix due to density, when in actuality it's because of the polarity of the molecules.

Remember that the Coriolis effect is nothing but the difference in the speed of earth's rotation across the 11 inches of the frisbee.... that's an infinitesimally small amount. It's not going to affect anything at the scales we're talking about.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...site-direction
http://www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/Bad/BadCoriolis.html
http://www.snopes.com/science/coriolis.asp
http://science.howstuffworks.com/sci...t-baseball.htm

[Bryscus]

Originally Posted by F22Rapture

I was under the impression that the Coriolis effect was almost completely negligible in small-scale systems. Similar to how it isn't actually responsible for water's rotation around a sink or toilet (they're actually designed that way), the curve of a frisbee is almost exclusively determined by the angle it was thrown at, and from which direction.

It's one of those bad, only 1% true explanations that caught hold in popular culture and won't let go. Similar to how it's still taught in lower-level science courses that oil and water don't mix due to density, when in actuality it's because of the polarity of the molecules.

Remember that the Coriolis effect is nothing but the difference in the speed of earth's rotation across the 11 inches of the frisbee.... that's an infinitesimally small amount. It's not going to affect anything at the scales we're talking about.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...site-direction
http://www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/Bad/BadCoriolis.html
http://www.snopes.com/science/coriolis.asp
http://science.howstuffworks.com/sci...t-baseball.htm

I may be WAY off base here, but I believe it was a joke...

- Bryce

[F22Rapture]

Originally Posted by Bryscus

I may be WAY off base here, but I believe it was a joke...

- Bryce

That may be correct