paper: Parabolic Trajectory Calculations

[Ether]

Originally Posted by marccenter

The assumption appears reasonable with the shooting range we are seeing on our robot.

I think there might be a misunderstanding. Terminal Velocity is independent of shooting range. It is a function of mg, Cd, rho, and A only.

[Ether]

Originally Posted by Ether

Thread created automatically to discuss a document in CD-Media.

Parabolic Trajectory Calculations by Ether

I've recently received a couple of PMs asking about the formulas in the spreadsheet. I'm going to post summaries of the answers here so interested students may benefit:

Some cells are hidden to make the user interface cleaner. To make those cells visible: Unhide columns GHIJK, move the graph out of the way, and highlight the whole spreadsheet.

The air drag acceleration vector D always points 180 degrees opposite to the Velocity vector V.

The magnitude of D is modeled as:

(V²/V_t²)*g

... where V_t is the magnitude of the terminal velocity.


The magnitude of the X component of D is

(V²/V_t²)*g*cos(θ)

= (V²/V_t²)*g*(Vx/V)

= (V*V_x/V_t²)*g


The magnitude of the Y component of D is

(V*V_y/V_t²)*g