wondering about distances between balls

[Wc Keep]

i read that in another forum (granted its not the most reliable forum) that if one ball travels at 260 and the next one after it goes 280 than its possible for the second to catch up and hit that other ball? i dont see this being possible but im no physics major so if anyone cares to enlighten me be my guest.

[battlegroup]

Short answer: no the second will not hit the first.

Long answer: In theory it's possible if the speed of the second was faster than the first and if the time between shots was short enough, there was no wind, or gravity, and the balls were exactly the same. Because the speeds are different the path of flight will be different, and they will be affected differently by wind. The second may catch up to the first in distance wise, but the odds of it hitting it are so remote I doubt it would happen.lets suppose we take the numbers you suggested.
To cover 260 feet the first would have to be in the air one second. The second could cover the distance in .928 seconds. Thats 8 hundreths of of a second delay that we can have between the first ball and the second if they are to meet after one second.Tthat's 14 balls a second on the trigger, which is possible. But for them to hit each other there would have to be no wind, the gun would have to have been fired at the exact same angle pointed at the exact same spot and the effect of gravity would have to be neglected. If the gun were shot perfectly level, In one second the first ball would drop 9.8 meters due to gravity. The second would drop only 9.09 meters in the time (.928 seconds) it took to reach the first one. therefore because of gravity the second ball would be .71 meters higher than the first and they would never hit. Unless you are aiming exactly off on the right spot with the second they will not hit, it would be a freak occurance.

I can show you the math if you had a hard time following the text.

[Dayspring]

My brain hurts...

I'm functioning on the level of "Fire bad. Tree Pretty."

[Wc Keep]

no i followed it perfectly. the one guy said he was shooting 15 bps and it happened right outside of the barrel making it look like a barrel break. but the way you said it that doesnt seem to be possible.

thanks for the answer.

[Mossman]

Most definately not possible in the barrel. Let's go to opposite ends of the spectrum. When the ball leaves the barrel over a chrono its going 300fps. The fact that he said it happened in the barrel is even better because we don't have to deal with as much theoretical stuff on account of air resistance.

Anyhow.....lets say that a ball is traveling 200fps through a 2 foot barrel (we'll give him every advantage we can. You're shooting 20FPS, one shot every .05 seconds. Let's say the 2nd shot comes out at 250 FPS. Damn, I'm a tired mess and don't wanna do the math right :) We're gonna assume a constant 200fps and 250fps...ok :)

OK....so the 200fps first ball will get through the barrel in 1/100th of a second.

Uh oh....its long gone from the barrel by the time you even realize you've pulled the trigger. If you could shoot 100fps and your balls moved at the speed of light...you'd have a chance :)

Please tell me where i screwed up :)

[battlegroup]

At 15 bps it would take just under a second for the balls to "meet". It wouldn't happen right out of the barrel unless the first ball was severely underspeed. It would have to be like a shortstroke follwed by a full speed shot.

[manike]

It is possible to shoot paintballs that you fired yourself...

On doing some very high speed testing with my X-mag I occasionally got fluffed shots that would only just make it out the barrel. On occassion these were hit from behind by the next paintball causing a huge cloud of paint...

On a few occasions the fluffed ball didn't even make it out the barrel. But mostly the cloud burst happened about a foot or two infront of the barrel.

I know it was balls hitting others as at one point it happened right in the last cm of the tip, with two different coloured paints. I went from having a clean barrel to a barrel with orange and blue paint in the tip.

If the second ball hadn't been coming the first one would have only gone a few feet. So the velocity difference was much more than 260 to 280 fps. More like 5fps compared to 300fps...

Curt from Exarin.com has also had this happen with a high speed excalibur when testing ultimate rof's.

I think it happened with my gun because I didn't give the valve long enough to recharge and was running it with a low (600psi ish) input pressure at a rof set somewhere near 40cps hehehe and thus was occasionally getting blooper shots...

manike

[magman007]

AND he wonders how he fried his solenoid! lol just ribbin you simon!

[manike]

Originally posted by magman007
AND he wonders how he fried his solenoid! lol just ribbin you simon!

This was done after the World Cup, when I was trying to see how fast the gun could go and test out my trigger set up also :)