nerfbazooka

Hi,

My daughter's doing a science fair project. It's a spinoff of her older brother's construction of a crossbow.

We are using an unmodified Nerf Tech Target gun. Its SKU (barcode) is 7693045518.

What we would like to know is the initial muzzle velocity of the thing.

We are using a projectile motion Java applet found online. It lets you see a trajectory with a given mass, initial velocity, and angle of elevation. It even allows you to check the effects of drag as an option.

We have found that drag is very important. The darts slow down greatly due to wind resistance. Right now we are experimenting with different shapes for the warhead. All of these weigh 1.98 grams.

I'm using this forum as a back-up in case Hasbro doesn't come through with the specs in time. We would like to have the results in meters/sec, but feet/sec or even mph would be fine.

We are using home-made darts of 1.98 g each.

Does any one have a ballistics pendulum? Just curious--it's not something that a 5th grader would know about.

--Grateful father