

A Statistical Analysis of Nerf Blasters and Darts - gammarator
http://shawntoneil.com/index.php/pages/nerftest1

======
mikeknoop
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](http://zpr.io/PphB.png)

High-speed footage of added rotation:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87Y0A6IMJM8&list=SP0FF1657C0B...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87Y0A6IMJM8&list=SP0FF1657C0B08FAB8&index=15)

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

PPT report:
[http://mikeknoop.com/upload/MAE4980CapstonePresentation.pptx](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%)

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

Would adding a cocktail stick to the dart help? Or is modifying darts not
acceptable?

~~~
mikeknoop
Adding weights to the tip helps dramatically, even without rotation. There is
a small hole in the tip of streamline darts which you can push metal BBs into
to achieve this out-of-the-box.

However one of our design requirements was _not_ to modify the darts because
it was disallowed for safety concerns from another student-org of mine:
[http://muzombies.org](http://muzombies.org)

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sargun
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.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
I think you need to organize a game of Humans vs Zombies in your area.

~~~
mikeknoop
You might find it interesting that a fellow HN-er (read: me) totally geeked
out to this in college.

I even built a better version of the game engine which is still actively used
at Mizzou and Truman State:
[https://github.com/mikeknoop/knoopvszombies](https://github.com/mikeknoop/knoopvszombies)

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Would you mind explaining, since your readme doesn't, precisely what
modifications you've made to the core game?

Also, now I've got an urge to submit a patch allowing sub-fora for squads and
factions. I can't believe it only hit me yesterday what fun it would be to
wreak politics on a game of HvZ!

------
pc86
Why is the author reinventing the way links work? The *'s are far too small
and it makes the article itself look ridiculous.

~~~
aerique
I was about to comment on this as well but I saw the \subsection{headers} and
thought perhaps it was a conversion gone wrong. At least, I hope so.

------
wjnc
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.

~~~
gammarator
Looks like R, not Python.

~~~
dbaupp
Yep, it looks like the plots are done with ggplot2
([http://ggplot2.org/](http://ggplot2.org/)), and the code at the bottom is
definitely R.

