A Statistical Analysis of Nerf Blasters and Darts | Hacker News Reader

A Statistical Analysis of Nerf Blasters and Darts

shawntoneil.com

61 pointsgammarator16 comments

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%)

> 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?

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

Dude, thats awesome. I think its funny as hell that you're irrelevant capstone project would be hn relevant and awesome that you are here to see it.

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.

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

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

Watup Mike, good to see you spreading HvZ, disappointed to see you type "geeked out"(kidding). -The mod who shall not be named.

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!

We do play Humans Vs. Zombies at SFSU roughly once a month. It's awesome!

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

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.

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.

Looks like R, not Python.

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

You might want to check out http://nbviewer.ipython.org/

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