Modeling Ball Shooters

[Basel A]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

Shooter wheels very noticeably slow down when a ball contacts them - you can see this if you take high speed video of a shot in progress (highly recommend doing this in development). Do you have any way of measuring the minimum speed a shooter wheel spins at during the shooting process? Perhaps the shooter is slowing down to that 2400 RPM mark just as the ball is leaving. I'm mostly spitballing here, but maybe there's something to this.

Right. Assuming no energy input after the ball enters the shooter (a bad assumption), the initial energy of the flywheel needs to be equal to the total energy of flywheel+ball at the speed you want the ball to go, plus losses. Was your 2400 RPM number taking this into account? If not, I'd definitely expect a shooter speed significantly higher than the needed ball speed.