Best Way to Launch unusual items?

[Scott Kozutsky]

This is an amazing opportunity to make plywood ghetto prototypes and do some good ol' fashioned testing. The three main things that peoples are suggesting are catapults, slingshots, hammers (all easy to prototype) and wheeled shooters (more difficult but doable).

Things like air power can probably be crossed off the list because getting a seal on a lunacy ball would be... lunacy (sorry, I had to) as well as accommodating the different shapes and sizes of the other pieces.

I think that a catapult would work best in this application but have no real experience (and neither does anyone else as far as I'm aware). Unless someone here can point to an off-season project they've done shooting multiple different gamepieces I would take everything with a large grain of salt. Implementation is an entirely new can of worms. If you do go for a catapult there are multiple options; lots of motor, stored energy and release (surgical tubing/spring), pneumatic, something else I've inevitably forgotten. Each option has advantages and disadvantages.