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So what do people do with a wedge if there is a raised ring? If you go out it will be extremely difficult to get back in since the wedge won't be able to climb over anything. I guess you could back in, if you don't have a wedge on the back too, but that could take some extra time and expose you to t...

I heard a rumour that Arden (2nd at nats last year) didn't make it this year? yes, it's true! I'm on Churchill's team, and we beat them at state! We've always been just a few points away from winning state, and we've actually beaten them at regionals before. This year we beat them by 18 points at s...

Is anyone having issues with the event coordinators choosing CWs that are too big for the launching area? My team missed a trip to nationals because the judges gave us a 2.5 kg CW and the celling was rather low (we hit the celling on the first two shots and we had to adjust our treb to not hit the ...

Wait does anyone know why this is technically a testing event when its obviously much more of a building event? Where do you find out whether an event is a testing event vs a building event? Though the team always approaches events from the testing vs. building perspective, I never knew that SO act...

There's actually a couple other factors, but they're hard to take into account. Use the ideal gas law, PV=nRT. (If you're not familiar, pressure x volume = number of moles x gas constant x temperature.) Balloons float for the same reason that people can swim; the weight of the balloon is less than ...

This was covered in another post. Balloon Race is not Mission Possible; Good Engineering (a whole lot of reasons here) means you won't have a barely-lifting balloon, risking 250+ points, just to add 5g and 50 points in an iffy situation. In the tournaments I've run, he quick-release, fast-rising ba...

Has anyone tried baking their towers at low temp., around 150degrees, and have their efficiencies go up? maybe building two identical towers, and baking one and not the other to see if strength is significantly reduced? The coaches at my school told me to bake my next tower, but I can see why some ...

The rules only say that the only liquids you can have are water and vinegar. They say nothing about dumping two solids into the water that then dissolve and react. Technically, any aqueous chemical reaction is legal, as long as it's safe. Also, vinegar is an acid and can be mixed with more than jus...

Here are my calculations: Vinegar = 5% acetic acid by volume 1 L of Vinegar = 1000 mL of vinegar= 50 mL of acetic acid= 50mL * 1.049 g/mL= 52.49 g of acetic acid Molar mass of acetic acid is 60.05g/mol, so there is 0.874 moles of acetic acid per L of vinegar. There is 1 mole of acetic acid in 1.144...

The rules say that the balloon must rise only due to it's buoyancy but it never states what environmental conditions you must contend with. In the old balloon race event there were numerous cases where air currents in the room caused balloons that were actually buoyant to either simply fail to rise ...