This is actually a response to something I saw in the PBN thread, but as I am not a member there, I am going to post it here.
Somebody said that they had a hard time believing that the relatively thick fill in a paintball would not move nearly in unison with the shell (what was actually said was a little less intelligent, but that was the gist of it).
The counterexample for this that popped into my head when I read it was this: Picture a piece of paper with.. lets say.. a rock sitting on top of it. If you pull on the paper, the rock slides along on top of it. Give it a good yank, though, and the rock will stay in pretty much the same spot as the paper slides out from under it.
That kid talking about how he disagreed with a lot of Newton's "ideas" or whatever was an absolute riot.
As for making a paintball "accurate", the best way I can think of to illustrate the futility of the effort is to picture water as the fluid instead of air, since the effects are more obvious. You know how when you drop something into water it doesn't go straight down, unless it is either quite dense or well-shaped aerodynamically? Try the same thing with more of the same object, and they will behave differently than did the first. No matter how perfectly you drop them, no matter how identical each one is to the one before it, their behavior on the way to the bottom will be quite different. The only way to increase your likelihood of hitting the same spot would be to either increase the velocity of the object, or change the object itself to be denser / more aerodynamic.
I can't say that I've ever even taken a physics class (well, not for more than a week or so), but this seems like common sense to me. A rare virtue, common sense..
Somebody said that they had a hard time believing that the relatively thick fill in a paintball would not move nearly in unison with the shell (what was actually said was a little less intelligent, but that was the gist of it).
The counterexample for this that popped into my head when I read it was this: Picture a piece of paper with.. lets say.. a rock sitting on top of it. If you pull on the paper, the rock slides along on top of it. Give it a good yank, though, and the rock will stay in pretty much the same spot as the paper slides out from under it.
That kid talking about how he disagreed with a lot of Newton's "ideas" or whatever was an absolute riot.
As for making a paintball "accurate", the best way I can think of to illustrate the futility of the effort is to picture water as the fluid instead of air, since the effects are more obvious. You know how when you drop something into water it doesn't go straight down, unless it is either quite dense or well-shaped aerodynamically? Try the same thing with more of the same object, and they will behave differently than did the first. No matter how perfectly you drop them, no matter how identical each one is to the one before it, their behavior on the way to the bottom will be quite different. The only way to increase your likelihood of hitting the same spot would be to either increase the velocity of the object, or change the object itself to be denser / more aerodynamic.
I can't say that I've ever even taken a physics class (well, not for more than a week or so), but this seems like common sense to me. A rare virtue, common sense..
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