Air Cannon

[artdutra04]

As for the air cannon safety issue, the answer is pretty simple. Just don't wrap elastic bands around the tee shirts. If you just roll them up, if you shoot them at a high angle* shot (like a mortar), they will just open up in the air and flap and drift downward at a very safe speed. You'll only get about half the range of what you normally would, but it'll be a lot safer.

* Another safety benefit of shooting tee shirts this way is that with very high angle shots, it becomes almost impossible to hit anyone at point blank range. A cannon with a three foot barrel, held four feet above the ground, at 60 degrees above the horizontal, means the end of the barrel is six and a half feet above the ground. Unless you're Yao Ming, is a fairly safe launch position.

Originally Posted by Otaku

Now, for a much safer system...

Use the FIRST air tanks and mount them to a dedicated launcher-bot (simple frame, tank drive, 2/4 air tanks, etc) that has a pneumatic system for an ARM instead of a cannon. Do the math and figure out the general trajectory of the different pressures (one bar at a time, ie 15psi, 30psi, 45, 60, 75, 90, so forth) as well as the boom ratios (1:2 ratio? 1:3? What can your pneumatics handle? How well does it work?) and such.

The FRC-legal pneumatics are too puny for air cannons. You need at least 3/4" NPT fittings to get a flow rate good enough to shoot a tee-shirt a considerable distance; the biggest fittings in the KoP are only 1/4" NPT. (From being bored at a meeting experience, no matter how many tanks and hoses in parallel you add, if you limit yourself to only KoP components, don't expect to shoot much more than a ping pong ball.)