"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:33:28 -0800, George Plimpton
wrote:

On 1/16/2012 2:45 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Mon, 16 Jan 2012 13:39:01 -0800 (PST), toolbreaker
wrote:

On Jan 16, 1:01 pm, wrote:
On Jan 16, 2:55 pm, Rich wrote:

And I wondered, why not a mile? A lot would depend on what kind of
propulsion you used, but I'm guessing the muzzle velocity would be
supersonic.

Thanks,
Rich

I am not convinced that you could propel a golf ball a mile. A golf
ball is round , which is not very good at going long distances. In
addition a golf ball is not very dense.

Dan

I ran a 3 dof ballistics program in matlab. Assuming a coef of drag
of .55 ( found on the internet) rammiping up to 1 at mach 1 the ball
traves 400 meters if I launch it at Mach 1 (330 m/sec) and 40 deg

Unless you're shooting it out of a gun, or otherwise applying a
progressive force to a full hemisphere of it, I think that the first
question is how much energy you can store in that never-very-hard mass
when you whack it with a flat object, and how much it can release on
the rebound. That may not be so easy to figure.

I don't have the math and engineering skill to do it, but it can be
done. Engineers have been doing it for some time in determining the bat
performance factor (BFP) for metal bats. It probably has been done for
a long time, but it took on more urgency once it was determined that
players were increasing the "trampoline effect" by "rolling" their bats.

Oh, yeah, I'm sure it can be done. It's not a trivial thing to
evaluate and it doubtless requires some experimental testing.

I wonder if the golf ball manufacturers have determined the limits, or
if they just limit their testing to the values they know can be
achieved by a real golfer swinging a real club.

In any case, there is a practical limit to how much energy can be
stored in one of those balls by whacking it with a club, and a lesser
(and probably diminishing as the input force increases) limit to how
much it can return by rebounding. And those limits likely are not very
much greater than the limits designed into the ball for real-world,
practical club-whacking. It seems likely that they're optimized for
that.



Actually shouldnt be that difficult....

A good starting point = drop one straight downward into a vertical canyon,
just a rough guess but thinking you'll probably find that the terminal
velocity is ~350 mph.