So this started over at the segment on "care and feeding of jute slings" here:
http://slinging.org/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1525262929I got a bit off topic, and I apologize. I am genuinely curious what the service-life of various types of sling are, and also in starting up a bit of a study of how slinging works, maths wise.
It would be of interest to record not just competition outcomes, but routine shooting as well. For those throwing at standard ranges, there's easy scoring metrics, but I break it down to disks, boards and misses instead, which simplifies tracking, is easy to turn into a score later, and will also work with non-standard ranges, either shorter or longer.
There's also a service-life tracker for the sling itself, tracking throws with what kind of ammunition, the date, and treatments done to the sling, and so on. This would give us a general ball park of what to expect from slings, and not much else.
I am trying to put together a basic form for range-throwing, as opposed to accuracy, but that's a little more difficult. I'll likely break it down by the same categories as the target book (Sling length, light, weather, ammunition, and place) with "Meters" changed over to "Max Range". This could then be broken down to 25m increments, perhaps? The idea being to record the number of throws landing in each increment (0-25/26-50/51-75/76-100/etc) out to about 300 yards, with space for remarks, which can hold longer shots. I'm still not entirely sure how I'm going to implement this, so it'll be a while in coming.
I might also start up a Google Drive Form for this as well.
The larger the body of information, the better we can compute averages. These can then be used for whatever we like, yes, but also by historians. If amateurs like us are shooting 75%, let's say, on a standard target 20 meters away, and getting ranged shots routinely bracketing 200 yards, there's now some evidence for them to go off of when discussing the ancient world.
Not exactly precise, I know. But it's better than the nothing we've currently got!
Thank you for your help on this strange and unusual side project. If anyone wants the data, I'll gladly hare, just send me a message here. Also, I'm more than happy to take type-setting advise and change up the forms as needed.
I'll link the Google Form for this in a second post in this thread.