Look Ma!! It's a Dimpled Paintball!!!

[Restola]

Forgive my overall lack of fluid dynamics knowledge, but the wake vortices cause a lot of the drag when an object moved through a fluid. Submarine technology for example tries to focus on moving those away from the sub, which decreased drag. Or in an airplane, you have probably heard of wingtip vortices. When those are disrupted by ground effect or winglets, there is a significant increase in performance.

vortices next to an object = bad

[joeyjoe367]

Dimples on Golf-Balls works because a golf-ball is spinning.

Paintballs, on the other hand, are lobbed "knuckle-ball" style, imparting as little spin on the ball as possible.

I think that's why it didn't work. Correct me if I'm wrong.

[giblit]

has anyone actually seen these fly?

[sniper1rfa]

kinda, golf ball dimples are there because of spin, specifically to reduce drag without worrying about spin too much.

its all about the turbulence (vortices, actually little low pressure zones, "sucking" on the ball, as it were) in the wake. the smaller the wake, the less drag, meaning the ball will decelerate slower and go farther.


this is why airplane wings have the blunt end in the front, as it has little to do with drag. the thin, tapered tail allows the wake to be extremely thin.

[pito189]

I once read in Popular Science that they were experimenting with putting dimples on plane wings. I believe it was supposed to increase range, on a flight.

[sniper1rfa]

they did to, but bird excrements made the wings too unstable.

just like a scuffed golf ball...

[pito189]

I wonder if they have ever heard of a pressure washer?

[sniper1rfa]

no, like one hit and that wings drag went way up. and they only tried it on smaller planes, not large commercial aircraft. they were great, until ANYTHING interrupted the flow across the wing.

[FalconGuy016]

The first one is the air flow over a smooth ball. The second one is air flow over a dimpled ball. The smooth ball has a larger area where the air seperates from the flow around the ball and it creates more drag. The more turbulent flow around the second ball has more air flow around the ball and less area where the air seperates from the air flow and starts swirling around and stuff like that, so less drag.

[ShinyGuy]

Originally posted by sniper1rfa
this is why airplane wings have the blunt end in the front, as it has little to do with drag. the thin, tapered tail allows the wake to be extremely thin.

I was reading about putting things in orbit with railguns. They were talking about how at hyper-sonic speeds you do see a significant decrease in drag with a pointed nose vs. a rounded nose. The problem was that the pointed nose wasn't able to disapate the heat as well as the rounded nose. The conclution they came to was that it would actually be pretty easy to get cargo into orbit with a railgun once we developed material that could withstand the heat a reshaped launch vehicle would be subjected to.

Now keep in mind that this was talking about mach 7+ and isn't really relevent to paintball. I just thought you'd find it interesting. I wish I could that paper now, It was an interesting read.

[paintposse]

i dont think they would work cuz it would make the balls curve dramatically. Its in a popular sicece. I has a buch of stuff in golf and like a shallow dimpled ball would travel farther and with less spin so it would go straighter.

[Smoken]

"the problem is, on something this small, tiny impurities in the surface can do the same thing as dimples. in a fluid dynamics book a read, a 3 inch rough sphere had 5 times less drag at 125 mph winds than a smooth one. and the roughness was in the form of scores only .003" deep. "

So would this mean that the mild roughness of the RPS advantage paints might actually have some value?

[FESTUS33]

How do thos ball's react to a 9 Iron

[FESTUS33]

Sorry I did'nt mean to make fun
but it was a question begging
to be asked
Festus

[FESTUS33]

Yes I do understand What's Being said here
and there are a lot of good point's being
made.Being a Machinist/ p'balller/amateur scientist
I love watching this kind of information exchanged