Magid Angle and Interesting Tech Observations for 2009

[IKE]

So back in Aim High, many teams found out that there was a magic angle of around 24 to 30 degrees off of normal for their shooters that gave a fixed trajecory that was good from about 7 to 27 feet from the target. (I think thee were a couple papers published about this, but I know a couple of us on our team figured this out independently and correlated results).

This year I thought that there was another magic angle around 55-60 degrees off of normal that lended itself to a great range of shots from 0-12 feet that had an in-air dwell time that ranged from 0.75 to about 0.9 seconds with the sweet spot for dwell time right at the 3-4 foot range. I know that several other figured this out as there were a lot of shooters similar to ours that would bubble balls into the travel with a nearly flat spin (we thought this would be best because they staked themselves on the tubes and thus increased the target size).

Then we saw the backspinning power dumper. Most of those had a flat trajectory and fired balls at with a muzzle velocity of about 15 fps. This in effect gave the a target range of about 0 (just catching the back) to 5 feet out (just over the rear of the traibler). The backspin caused the ball to drop straight down when hitting the post (this actually hurt us in Aim High as it would cause a 30% descore rate in our initial shooter that year). Teams that figured this design out really did well this year.

Any other "Magic angle" type revelations that teams care to share? I would love to read a white paper on certain teams traction control development. Some teams gave some very powerful clues and ideas on implementing various types of systems. Did anyone find a "magic" slip percentage or power level that worked really well?


***I use the term "magic" because just like old sorcery or a magicians show, there are often really cool technical designs behind things that mysteriously just seem to work. In 2006 there were a lot of teams with adjustable cannons that seemed shocked that a fixed angle, fixed velocity could be so accurate over such a broad range.