Frondeur
Junior Member
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I'm the lead slinger in a hard rock band
Posts: 90
France
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Hello every one!
Just some thoughts about glandes shapes,
I believe the most aerodynamic shape should be, in theory, something with a perfectly round front and an infinite pointy tail (think of a plane's wing, just veeee...eeery long). I'm not sure that is a fact, but it doesn't matter now... For realistic reasons, egg-shapes or teardrops should be a good proxy of that, and I'm pretty sure those are known to have pretty good aerodynamic properties.
Now, looking at pictures of ancient sling bullets, I can't help to notice egg-shapes are very scarce, compared to the vast amount of spherical, biconical, or ellipsoid- (football-) shaped glandes. The ancient knew their ballistics far better than I do, so I wondered why they choose less efficient shapes for ammo.
First I thought about fabrication constraints, witch could be the case for the leaden almond-shaped roman glandes ( flatter, so easier to get out of the mold. may count, on an industrial scale; just a guess, I'm no historian nor physicist)
A second factor could be the symmetry of the shape. When placing the glande in the pouch, the slinger has no need to consider its orientation. I never slung in a rather stressful environment like, say, a battlefield, but I reckon I could experiment some shaking-hands issues during the operation...
I should also mention the fact that a pointy shape means a smaller impact zone, and therefore more chance to put the opponent out.
Then back to aerodynamics. Assuming teardrop would be the best, the bullet has still to be thrown with a good pouch alignment in order to produce a good riffle spin. Now I'm coming to what was the point of this post: pouch alignment can't be perfect, and the glande has, with its own properties, the ability to more or less realign itself. And now I'm getting lost, so what follows is just guesses: ovoid shapes have been rejected because they don't realign much; the misaligned rounded face offers no significant drag increase until the tail wobbles out too much, and the shot stabilizes itself with it long axle perpendicular to the shooting line. bad. Biconical ammos tend to be more resilient to bad pouch alignment, considering that the front of the glande offers less drag when facing the target, and that this drag increases when the point goes out of the perfect way. that resilience should also explain the fact that a well-thrown glande always lands point first albeit its trajectory is somewhat parabolic.
Am I right about this? What do I miss? (yeah, I know. The diana. Consistently) Can I consider the football-shape to be a mix of the two? like, better aerodynamic than biconical, but still a good ability to realign?
furthemore, I don't understand how the proportions of the shape affects the realignment/aerodyanmic ratio. proportions of 2:1 has been good enough for me during my few experiments playing with mud, but i've no more clay around me for now...
If you folks could comment my thoughts, and cruelly point the weakness of my mind, welcome.
Frondeur
- and, once again: wow, what a forum! thanks to the Computer Masters and their numerous followers!
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