Rocketman / Don,
You know that I have expressed my opinions. And valuable opinions they are, too. Please stay in the discussion.
But I would never stand in the way of progress.
As you rightly said CoF is very important and to this end we need to consider that early traps both manual and automatic used rubber buffers on the throwing arm.
Modern machines now use polyfluoro or polyvinyl material as blade buffers so I would think the CoF is considerably reduced. Is it sufficiently reduced to impart a slower spin than in times past?
Also in the single pellet airgun tests are we using 0.177", 0.22" or 0.09" pellets? Various size shotgun pellets so as to have a variety of impact energies. A cleaning wad is used as the "transporter" for the pellet.
Finally is it so important to concentrate on single pellet breaks? For any given pattern, there is a significant amount of the patterns area wherein one pellet hits are quite probable. To understand the effectiveness of patterns, we must be able to predict the probability of breaks within the pattern.
Should we not be spending research time on improving effective patterns. Agree, but we must be able to define "effectiveness." To do so,we are going to have to know probability of single pellet breaks over a range of pellet size and MV. Also, multi-pellet hits. Dr. Jones has cracked open the door on this issue. We have a lot to learn.
Granted I will always accept 100 chips against 99 balls of dust but where is this one pellet break theory leading? We have to have it to know when we are making improvement. What is longest known run of clay targets? Now, consider the longest runs of moving targets (say, thrown wooden blocks) with a .22 rifle. The .22 rifle is a single pellet hit or a miss. It would appear that allowable aiming error for very long runs is within the reach of some. Can it be that long runs are actually limited by the probability of failure to break from some number (1? 2? ---) of hits catching up with the shooter?
