Donate SIGN UP

What is the terminal velocity of a standard pub dart?

Avatar Image
JonnyBoy12 | 17:28 Sun 06th Sep 2009 | Science
2 Answers
Everyone knows that a person stupid enough to jump out of a perfectly good aircraft will reach top speed, or terminal velocity, of about 120 miles per hour. What is the terminal velocity of a standard dart I find in a pub if I throw that out of an airplane, which is say 20,000 feet up? What is the speed when it hits the ground, and what could it go through? I would imagine it would go through a person like a hot knife through butter.

Thanks for any sensible replies.
Gravatar

Answers

1 to 2 of 2rss feed

Best Answer

No best answer has yet been selected by JonnyBoy12. Once a best answer has been selected, it will be shown here.

For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.
Without kowing the weight, size, condition, area to wind resistance etc. I don't think it is possible to work it out anywhere near exact, but as a freefall standard average bullet has a TV of about 200mph, I guess a dart would fall at about 250mph. This is not fast enough to go through a person.
The dart, being relatively small, would reach TV even if dropped off a tall building.
Here is a NASA web page with an applet that calculates terminal verocity

http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/k-12/airplane/termv.html

There is a thread here that discusses tranquilised darts as having a drag coefficient of about .2 - I'd imagine the cross-sectional area would be about .000005 square m

So that comes out at about 44m/s or about 98 miles per hour.

Mind you a tranquiliser dart's probably not very aerodynamic - see if you can find the drag coefficient for a standard dart and feed in the figures

1 to 2 of 2rss feed

Do you know the answer?

What is the terminal velocity of a standard pub dart?

Answer Question >>

Related Questions

Sorry, we can't find any related questions. Try using the search bar at the top of the page to search for some keywords, or choose a topic and submit your own question.