Board Thread:General Nerf discussion/@comment-43428212-20191001202639/@comment-27306930-20200129023937

Rskm1 wrote:

... There's no hop-up/Bernoulli effect, though... I'm not sure hop-up would work well with foam balls. It's actually the Magnus effect, not the Bernoulli effect. And it's highly mass dependent because of the loss of angular momentum due to air resistance. It's basically the same reason you can't throw a crumpled up piece of paper across a large room no matter how hard you try, but you can throw a billiard ball of the same size five times farther, with less effort. Maybe farther.

Foam balls would cease to rotate after just a few feet because the friction of air resistance would slow the ball down almost immediately. While spinning, it would already be converting its tiny amount of rotational energy into lift via the Magnus effect. When the air resistance due to forward movement is added to the equation, the net effect might actually slow the ball down and decrease its range. And when I say "might", I definitely mean "definitely" 😜