On 22 Dec, 01:46, geoff wrote:

I've wondered about that in the past - surely they would be a bit "pear"
shaped from their passage through air

No, you need an alloy with good surface tension, and a low viscosity
fluid to fall through. This is why round shot is made by dropping
through air until it's solid, rather than pouring directly into water.

"Pear" or "teardrop" shapes might be an efficient shape for
streamlining (i.e. lower drag for a shape that's already that shape),
which also implies it's the lowest energy shape and thus the shape a
drop is encouraged to form into by the viscous drag. However at
Reynold's numbers this low, there's not enough drag force (relative to
surface tension) to force a drop into any shape, so surface tension
predominates.