Paintball Spin Physics - Getting to the final Answer

[hitech]

I'm not sure if we have looked into the effects of rifling on the vortex shedding yet...so...

http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/apr102004/1033.pdf

Spinning a sphere with the axis perpendicular to the flow will produce significant lift at high enough RPMS (i.e. flatline barrel). Spinning a sphere with the axis parallel (as in rifling) does not produce the same results. Any research on cylinders is useless as it is always with the axis perpendicular. I've never seen any research on the effects of axis parallel spin on vortex shedding. And certainly not at the Re numbers for paintball flight. Other than Tom's experiments. And they did not capture any data on vortex shedding anyway.

Another idea is to create a marker with an elongated breech and a detent system which allowed 2 balls to be fired at the same time, creating a projectile more similar to a cylinder.

Tournament legality could be preserved for one shot, one pull, by storing the pulls and only firing in clusters of 2.

I'd love to see test results for that. It's quite possible that closely "drafting" paintball will avoid the vortex shedding problem. Basically it changes the shape of the object.

It would never be tournament legal.