Board Thread:General Nerf discussion/@comment-29595756-20170517015744/@comment-27306930-20170519041243

A Venturi Effect FireStrike. It's a way of reshaping the plunger tube to get an exponential increase in the air velocity, and by extension a geometric increase in the velocity of the darts.

Here's the thing. A traditional plunger has a large diameter tube with a small opening in the end where the air comes in contact with the dart. In reality, some of the air is bouncing back off the bottom of the plunger tube and working against the plunger. The smaller the opening, the greater the effect.

The Venturi "choke" compresses and focuses the air into a really high speed column of air that's completely directed at the tail end of the dart. There's a bunch of fluid dynamics behind it, but rather than being proportional to the decrease in diameter, the Venturi is inversly sqaure to the reduction in diameter. In other words if the diamter of the plunger decreases by one half, the velocity increases by four. One third reduction becomes nine time faster. It's insane.

Bottom line, by simply reshaping the end of the plunger tube the right way, you can get an incredible increase in performance. Like freakishly improved. I thought this whole thing was BS until I tried it. Hitting targets at 60+ feet is not a problem now. With a wimpy old FireStrike.