Project Abstract
Darren Kartchner
Manzano High School
Team 035

Paintballing has become a popular sport. It requires stealth, intuition, and precision, but it makes for an exciting hobby. However, since science and mathematics can be applied to virtually everything, my project is to devise a program that will calculate a trajectory path of a paintball. Factors that will be applied will include natural gravity, the power and angle of the paintball gun used, air drag, wind resistance, and various types of weather. Different velocities of wind will certainly affect the paintball's final path, but the temperature and altitude of the paintballing arena may affect the density of the air and of the paintball and thus its trajectory. I hope to take into consideration all of these factors using physics and mathematical formulas.

The next phase of my project is to research the physics and mathematics of paintball trajectories with air drag. From my research I will develop the mathematical models that will be the basis of my C++ program. I will submit five references in my interim report.

I plan to write a C++ program that will simulate a 3-D path of a paintball. Once created, I hope my program will give a new dimension of insight to paintballers. Given their knowledge of their equipment and their environment, paintballers can use my program to become sharpshooters and increase their paintballing skills and, quite possibly, their love of the game.

Currently, I am taking an Adventures in Supercomputing programming class at Manzano High School, where we are learning the basics of C++ programming. In the class we are also learning UNIX, file/folder management, FTP, and TELNET.