Although the original ran into many problems, the biggest one was that once built, it could only hurtle a water balloon about ten yards. Apparently, all of the simulations that we ran forgot to take into account the energy needed to propel the arm. Also, even if the springs were made strong enough to get the entire launching apparatus moving, stopping it would have been nearly impossible. The stopper would have needed to absorb up to about 1000 slug * ft2 / sec2 !!!! This simply was not possible given our time and financial constraints.
Obviously, less than half of the minimum distance would not do; our group was not going to make a rediculously poor showing at the competition. We started working on Ya Gotta Have One, one of our earlier brainstormed ideas. Unfortunately, we had spent so much time on the intricate details of the first launcher, that it was two days before the competition before we tested the original to find its flaw. Even if we had increased its launching ability to the desired range, the catapult arm would have been going to fast to be stopped without breaking either the arm or the stopper or both. So in one long, hard day, we designed and built what we feel was one of the soundest and simplest designs at the competition.
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