Board Thread:General Nerf discussion/@comment-27306930-20190923064918/@comment-27306930-20190925012113

So I forgot to address the other infamous old wives' tale - the Nerf dart "hole".

To be fair, there are two types of holes in dart heads; the small round vent hole, and the larger rectangular whistler slot. The little round hole was added by Hasbro to make the head more flexible by allowing some air to escape on impact. And the whistler slot was obviously added to make them whistle.

Those small round holes don't affect dart performance. Not at the speeds you guys are shooting at. We know this because a couple of years ago clone darts started showing up without holes. Followed shortly by FVJs. All these new dart heads were the exact same shape as Nerf darts, and the weight was nearly identical. But despite having no hole, they performed exactly the same and delivered the same FPS, disproving once and for all that the hole affects performance. It was a nice coincidence that affordable chronometers showed up at about the same time so we could finally get some empirical data to back it up.

Whistler slots on the other hand, do affect accuracy. A small amount of air is sucked into the dart head to create the whistling sound. This affects the dart in two ways; it creates extra drag on the side with the slot, and it converts a small amount of the forward momentum into sound waves. Both of these cause the trajectory to pitch toward the side with the slot.

Some super-stock blasters shoot regular Elites fast enough to create a faint whistle from the small round hole. In those few exceptions, Elite darts are affected the same way as whistler darts, and consistency is slightly decreased. But to be fair, regular Elite darts behave crazy at super-stock speeds, so attributing your poor accuracy to the hole is just a cop out.

That being said, all that stuff in the wiki article about aerodynamics, air being sucked inside, compressing & deforming from resistance, and lacking "weight to stabilize" is incorrect. The overwhelming factor is the shape of the dart head. Elite darts just have a really bad ballistic profile.

Next up, we'll talk about TIT. Get your mind out of the gutter, it stands for Tail Induced Turbulence 🙄