🎯 Te tātaitai nekeneke o te pūwhiti

Mo tēnei tātaitai

Projectile motion describes anything launched into the air and left to gravity — a thrown ball, a fired shell, a jet of water. The trick is that the horizontal and vertical motions are independent: horizontally the object moves at a constant vx = v·cos(θ), while vertically it decelerates, stops and falls back under gravity g at vy = v·sin(θ) initially. With no air resistance and launching from level ground, the range is v²·sin(2θ)/g, the maximum height is (v·sin θ)²/(2g), and the total flight time follows from the vertical motion. Standard gravity is g = 9.80665 m/s².

As a worked example, launch at 20 m/s and 45° on level ground: vx = vy = 20 × 0.707 ≈ 14.14 m/s, the range is 20²·sin(90°)/9.807 ≈ 40.8 m, the peak height is 14.14²/(2×9.807) ≈ 10.2 m, and it stays airborne about 2.9 s. The calculator returns the range, peak height, flight time, the horizontal and vertical speed components and the impact speed, and plots the full parabolic trajectory.

On level ground the maximum range occurs at a 45° launch, because sin(2θ) peaks there; complementary angles like 30° and 60° give the same range but different heights and flight times. Set a launch height above ground under advanced options — for a projectile fired from a cliff or a thrown ball released at shoulder height — and the optimal angle drops slightly below 45°. These results ignore air resistance, so they overestimate the range of light or fast objects, but they are the standard model for sports, ballistics and physics problems.