Shooter Track Material - grippy or slick?

[Jibsy]

Originally Posted by FrankJ

So coat your rail & bottom plate with your physics professor's frictionless goo. Will the Frisbee just sit there & spin?

If it's frictionless can it really be considered goo?

[waialua359]

Our shooter does fine from where we want to shoot at various points of the field with a 1/4-wheeled shooter with no grip of any sort on the inside portions of the arc and bottom plate of our shooter.
We chose not to do extensive testing of what ifs because we are happy with the performance of what we have.

[billbo911]

Originally Posted by waialua359

Our shooter does fine from where we want to shoot ...
We chose not to do extensive testing of what ifs because we are happy with the performance of what we have.

That is exactly the right reason to stop testing and BUILD IT!!!!

I think a lot of teams are spending extra effort to see how far and how fast they can shoot, when it may not actually fit into their game play strategy. They may even find that accurate long distance shooting is not going to be as easy as they thought. That is, unless their strategy is to forwarding the disks up the field to clear the defensive end or just feed their alliance's shooters.

[Mr V]

Originally Posted by IndySam

No I'm with Ether, if the frisbee is against a slick surface it will slide along that surface and not get as much spin. If the surface is sticky it is forced to spin because it can't slide.

In all our testing the sticky surface always spins more and gets more distance than a slick surface.

Originally Posted by billbo911

This is going to require some hard data before I take it as fact.
Video, Chronograph, anything with solid numbers.

I'm only challenging this statement because it is opposite of what our analysis showed.



Exactly!

The spin causes the Frisbee to fly more stably and for a greater distance because of that stability. "Muzzle velocity" is not the only factor involved with Frisbee flight. Try hitting it with a tennis racket. You'll see very quickly the impact spin has on the flight of the disk.

I wish I had video that I could share, unfortunately I am a "floater" mentor this year helping the various sub-teams as needed. So despite multiple suggestions to video each of the changes that were made, so we could analyze them in slow motion, only a few cell phone shots were taken. . The lead mentor for our shooter team did not think there was any value in taking detailed video (nor making sure that the results of each change were recorded). Those few cell phone shots that were taken were always focused on where the disc was going, not the interaction between the wheel, disc and fence, nor did anyone describe the shooter's exact configuration during that shot.

The other thing to consider is a linear shooter vs a curved shooter will react differently since the force vectors are at different angles to the path of the disc.