Exterior Ballistics

Physics alert! This will contain physics and maths, all of which hopefully well
explained. This paper is intended to give and understanding to the concept
of exterior ballistics, what it means, why it is important to understand, some
of the mathematics behind it, how it can be used to understand what your
blaster is doing, and maybe even help a bit in your maths test. Notably by
the end of this you should understand why talking about “ranges” isn’t a
very useful metric of understanding the performance of a blaster.
The level of maths contained within this document may be too hard for
the entire audience to follow, although complicated sections will be explained
in full and then in summary. The intent is to derive from first principles the
equations behind the physics so as to form a cohesive chain from beginning
to end for those who are interested or take issue. It is however not critical
to follow every line of working to fully appreciate this document; the princi-
ples and results will be explained in clear language and there will be pretty
pictures! In terms of language, ”Nerf Blaster” and ”gun” will be used inter-
changeably since the application of this maths is identical for firearms, bows
and arrows, and anything else that fires a projectile.

Interior and Exterior Ballistics

For a bullet, there are 3 main distinct phases of its flight: interior, exterior,
and terminal ballistics. Simply put, interior ballistics is everything that
happens before leaving the gun, exterior ballistics is everything that happens
outside the gun, and terminal is everything that happens after impacting the
target. We won’t be discussing terminal for hopefully obvious reasons, and
this will be the last reference to it in this document.

Interior Ballistics
Interior ballistics is a huge topic in and of itself and in Nerf can occur in
several different ways to a normal gun since not all Nerf blasters use a barrel.
Although I did not use this terminology, my previous published paper was
on the interior ballistics of flywheel blasters. Interior ballistics are generally
quite complicated and covers many difficult concepts. Exploring the interior
ballistics of spring blasters and air blasters is topic for a future paper.
For the purposes of this paper we are completely ignoring the interior
ballistics since it doesn’t matter how a dart is accelerated to a certain velocity,
once it leaves the barrel and is flying through the air the gun can’t apply

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any more force on to the projectile. Importantly we will also ignore the
transitional ballistics as the dart leaves the blaster and assume that it departs
nice and straight, which is not always true!

Exterior Ballistics
Exterior ballistics is the primary focus of this paper and is the stage of
flight from when the projectile leaves the gun until it strikes the target.
Fortunately, this stage of flight is totally agnostic to the before and after and
can be investigated in isolation: an ideal dart leaving one blaster at 200ft/s
should behave identically to an ideal dart exiting any other blaster at 200ft/s
if we ignore the previously mentioned transitional ballistic effects like muzzle
blast, rifling, etc. It is important to understand that these effects are for a
non-ideal blaster and cannot to predicted without a detailed internal ballistic
study and for this paper we will be referring to an idealized blaster; perfectly
accurate, no muzzle blast, identical muzzle velocity with each shot. Future
work will investigate this.

Equations of Motion
In order to predict the motion of projectiles we need to begin by developing
a basic set of equations of motion. Specifically will we be investigating what
are sometimes referred to as the SUVAT kinematic equations of motion,
but the name is not so important; only what they represent. Understanding
the derivation is not essential to understanding this paper, but the results
they reflect are important.

Derivation
To start with, the state variables are typically defined as such: s = position,
u= initial velocity, v = velocity, a = acceleration, and t = time (hence
SUVAT). The very basic definition of velocity is the rate of change in position
over time and likewise acceleration is the rate of change in velocity over time.
(Fun fact! change in acceleration of time is called jerk, after that is snap,
crackle, and pop)
Mathematically, and brace for the calculus here, these can be expressed
as follows:

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 ∂s
v= (1)
∂t
∂v
a= (2)
∂t
For those that are not up to speed on calculus this is the fancy way of
writing: velocity is the change in position divided by the change in time, and
acceleration is the change in velocity divided by the change in time. These
equations can be solved very easily if a single important and very powerful
assumption is made: that acceleration, a, is constant over time.
Starting with equation (2) and rearranging, it can be solved via possibly
the simplest integration possible.

a∂t = ∂v
Z Z
a dt = dv

at = v + C

In order to solve for C, we have identified u as the initial velocity when t

= 0. Substituting this in the following result is obtained:

0a = u + C
C = −u
v = u + at (3)

This result should look quite familiar to many people: it gives the simple
answer that final velocity = initial velocity plus a constant acceleration mul-
tiplied by time. This should hopefully intuitively make sense. Returning to
the first derivative equation, we rearrange and substitute our previous result
and solve the integral:

∂s = v∂t
∂s = (u + at)∂t
Z Z Z
ds = u dt + at dt
at2
s = ut + +C
2

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 At time zero we define our position as zero and so we can substitute s =
0, and t = 0 to solve for C

02 a
0 = 0u + +C
2
C = −0
1
s = ut + at2 (4)
2
This should also look familiar.
A final very useful formula can be derived from a bit of calculus tricky,
by splitting the velocity with displacement:

∂v ∂s ∂v ∂v
a= = =v
∂t ∂t ∂s ∂s
by bringing the ∂s across we get:

Z Z
a ds = v dv
v2
as + C =
2
Again substituting the known result that when time equals zero, position
equals zero, and velocity equals initial velocity we get:

u2
C=
2
2
u v2
as + =
2 2
v 2 = u2 + 2as (5)

This one is very useful as it relates 4 other state variables without using
time in the equation.
There is a 4th equation of motion that can be derived from these three
to present a form that does not contain acceleration, but we will ignore its
derivation in this paper as it is not very useful; for completeness sake, the
equation is as follows:

t
s = (u + v) (6)
2
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Important Equations
From all these we obtain 3 key equations that we will use repeatedly through
this paper based around the assumption of constant acceleration:

v = u + at
1
s = ut + at2
2
v 2 = u2 + 2as

With these, we have the basic tools to solve almost any basic kinematics
equation and we can now actually begin with investigating exterior ballistics.

Basic Projectile motion

A good engineer’s first step in problem solving is to investigate exactly how
easy the problem can be made before attempting to solve it. Drag is difficult,
so we start by simply pretending it doesn’t exist; we can investigate that later
on once we have a basic understanding of the solution. Much better! This
assumption results in a drastically simplified free body diagram.

Free Body Diagram

What is a free body diagram? A free body diagram is a basic engineering
tool where all the forces being applied to an object, motion directions, angles,
etc are drawn out so that the problem can be clearly defined. For projectile
motion only under gravity, the free body diagram is exceedingly simple:

Figure 1: Free Body Diagram of a Projectile in flight with no drag

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 In words, we have a projectile that comes out at the muzzle at some
muzzle velocity and some angle and is influenced only by the force of gravity.
The motion can be split into two separate dimensions: left-right and
up-down. Using the basic trigonometry relationships we can resolve this
muzzle velocity into its two components and get uvertical = u sin(θ) and
uhorizontal = u cos(θ). This is helpful because gravity is only in the verti-
cal component which makes several important results very easy to derive. It
is also important to note that if the gun is fired perfectly flat (ie θ = 0), then
uvertical = 0 and uhorizontal = u.

Figure 2: Velocity Components of a Projectile in flight with no drag

Maths Time!
In the drag free scenario the horizontal velocity is constant as no force acts on
the projectile in this direction. The distance it travels can be found simply
by multiplying that velocity by time. The time it takes a projectile to hit
the ground is then a significant result to calculate. If we know how long it
takes the projectile to hit the ground, given the horizontal velocity of the
projectile, the distance it hits the ground can be easily found.
Consider the vertical dimension where the projectile is under constant
acceleration due to gravity. The initial velocity (uvertical = u sin(θ) from
before) is known, distance it travels downwards is known (the guns muzzle
height off the ground, let’s call this h), and the acceleration is a known
constant (gravity, g). By selecting the appropriate SUVAT equation, time
can be solved for.

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 1
s = ut + at2
2
−g 2
t + u sin(θ)t + h = 0 (7)
2
To solve this full equation the quadratic formula is required. The deriva-
tion of this formula will not be covered but numerous derivations are avail-
able. Substituting equation (7) into the quadratic formula gives:

p
u sin(θ) + (u sin(θ))2 + 2gh
t= (8)
g
While this equation appears particularly complicated, a significant sim-
plification can be made when the gun is fired at zero muzzle angle, since
sin(0) = 0. This gives a very simple form for when fired perfectly flat:

√ s
2gh 2h
t= = (9)
g g

This result really useful, since if we are at zero angle uhorizontal = u and
since there is no horizontal acceleration so we can combine our simple distance
equation of motion and get:

1
s =ut + at2
s 2
2h
flat range =u (10)
g

This is a very powerful equation: for example, substituting in the values

for a gun fired flat at shoulder height ( 1.5m) we get:

s
2 × 1.5m
impact time = = 0.553s
9.81m/s2
flat range = 250ft/s × 0.553s = 138.3ft

Pretty neat! As can be seen, the only variables that influence a projectiles
flat range in this equation are the shooters shoulder height and the muzzle

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velocity. It should be noted in this case that for a flat shot the guns range
is about half of muzzle velocity since it take about half a second for the
projectile to fall to the ground from 1.5m shoulder height. Additionally
since we know that drag will only reduce this range, we can confidently say
this is the upper boundary for true flat range a blaster.
In order to calculate time in an angled shot, we must use the full quadratic
equation version to account for the initial vertical component of muzzle ve-
locity and reduce the horizontal velocity accordingly. For example, the same
250ft/s shot fired 1.5m off the ground at only a 2.5◦ angle takes 0.988 seconds
to hit the ground and travels 246.7ft! This tiny angle gives 80% more range
than the true flat range.
It is important to be recall the previous assumption of no drag, which
will be more significant more longer flight times at higher angles and higher
velocities but this result already shows significant the effect even a tiny angle
of the muzzle angle plays in range results!

Summary of Useful Results

Flat range
Extra range due to angle

Coefficient of Drag
What is drag? Axial Flow Cylinder stuff

Basic Drag Solution

Free Body diagram
Numerical Solution

Ballistic Coefficient
Collation of Results
Range of darts as a function of ft/s