Shooting a curveball?

[bEdhEd]

Originally Posted by asid61

Thank you! We will make sure to test this.

No problem! I might actually bring this up to my team because so far our most successful shooter has been exactly what you describe: four wheels total, two vertical axles, with two wheels per axel.

They'll probably call me nuts, but since our axles are driven independently, I'll coerce our programmers to make it possible to have a curve ball setting so we can test this. I've wanted to shoot from the corner since day 1!

Post or send me video of your trials with this system. I would be totally down to see your results. I wish MVRT had a regional with us this year. it would have been neat if we both had curve ball shooters! I have a feeling that Sacramento is going to be INSANE! Maybe our teams will meet at champs.

Originally Posted by GeeTwo

I expect the curveball effects to start out at a moderate level and increase as the balls get increasingly torn up. Do you plan to have sensors to evaluate how beat up your boulder is?

This is something I was thinking about, too. Fortunately, we'll only need to change some code to achieve a curve ball with our current set up, so if this does indeed fail as a concept after testing, we wouldn't lose much in terms of building new prototypes; probably just an hour or two of time.

However it does beg the question, what is the big difference between the sideways curve you get from spinning vertically to the upward curve you get from a horizontally oriented backspin? The horizontal backspin is most commonly achieved by a single axle flywheel with a hood. The forces of the air around a ball with backspin still induces the Magnus Effect, so shouldn't we expect a depreciation in accuracy (from ball damage) for shooters that have a hood and single axle? We've seen these to be fairly accurate in past seasons when properly tuned, so why should the curve of a vertically spinning ball be any less reliable than that of a horizontally spinning ball as the balls progressively get damaged? The only difference is the relative direction of gravity acting on the ball. So the question I ask is, does the "direction" of gravity on a spinning damaged ball have a different effect depending on the axis of the ball's rotation relative to the normal vector of the ground plane (ie, the direction of the force of gravity)?