Oh man! Who would have known my undergraduate capstone project would be so relevant?

To improve accuracy of Nerf Blasters, we realized that barrel rifling had little effect. So we took a different approach.

Prototype: http://zpr.io/PphB.png

High-speed footage of added rotation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87Y0A6IMJM8&list=SP0FF1657C0B...

(all videos: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0FF1657C0B08FAB8)

PPT report: http://mikeknoop.com/upload/MAE4980CapstonePresentation.pptx

Major problem is fishtailing. Adding too much rotation and the darts just aren't rigid enough to hold a solid spiral.

In the end, adding 4 degrees per flywheel off the horizontal gave the best rotation vs. consistency (the darts held about 1500-1800RPM). There are already Nerf Blasters in production that use flywheels, so it's not hard to imagine introducing a small tilt.

We didn't do hardly the statistical analysis from OP but our numbers:

Distance +4.6 ft. (14%)

Accuracy Standard Deviation -2.3 ft. (40%)

This is actually pretty interesting to me. There is actually a community around amateur Nerf.

One thing that Nerf offers over paintball, and Airsoft is that it's playable in an urban area, without much planning, and coordination with local authorities. I think there are a lot of us in this community that would be very open to making this field (real life gaming / ARGs) more mature, with better equipment.

Why is the author reinventing the way links work? The *'s are far too small and it makes the article itself look ridiculous.

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iPython? How did he manage to get that seamlessly on his blog? It's awesome that you can get really professional scientific looks for random cool stuff.