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Ask Slashdot: The Very Best Paper Airplane?
An anonymous reader writes "'The Harrier' (or 'Eastern star,' as it is also called), is very well known, and is considered to be one of the best paper airplane designs. After much searching and trying, I have not found a better plane. So, I am asking Slashdot: is there anything that beats 'The Harrier' in a competition (indoors or outdoors)? This would be a really nice geek skill!"
Speed? Distance? Height? The optimal design depends on what you want to achieve.
Back when I was still at school, one year, my classroom was one overlooking a deep vale. One of our primary pastimes that year was chucking assorted stuff out the window and see how it'd fly. Mostly (but not limited to) paper planes.
The record winner for that year in terms of distance covered, and by far, was also the simplest model we ever came up with.
It was much like the Ring mentioned above, except even simpler. Where the Ring's profile makes an O, the Box's makes a square U. So you don't even need tape.
Just take a rectangular piece of paper, fold the front over several times to make a thicker leading edge, and fold two vertical wings so the thing will look somewhat like an elongated cube with three missing sides. That's it. Not only it flies, but it flies pretty well, so long as you balanced the 'wings' well enough.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
I would have appealed their decision. If that's the whole story you were smart, not an ass. I've always judged my planes against the baseline of a crumpled paper ball, and when I've run competitions, we always had an event specifically for crumpled balls. If your event organizers didn't want that design, they should have prohibited it before the event. If that design never occurred to them, then you taught them a valuable engineering lesson.
Bullshit. The paper plane throw record is 69 m. Try match that with your paper ball. You can definitely exclude a ball from the definition of "plane". It follows a ballistic trajectory because it doesn't generate lift.
"A great long canon fires a ballistic trajectory, with it's impact speed higher than it's initial muzzle velocity."
Orly? the only way the cannon shell would gain speed from such a trajectory is if it dropped farther than it rose and I believe that both ships would be sitting on a medium that tends towards a certain amount of flatness. I'm willing to bet that any miniscule gain from this would be greatly outweighed by velocity lost due to air resistance.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'