Ballistics Animation
by Jon Peltier
Sunday, August 24th, 2008
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2012.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
I’ve done a handful of animations lately:
- Gas Prices – Animated Bar Chart for Excel
- Gas Prices – Animated Bar Chart for Excel 2
- Gapminder for Excel
- Rolling Wheel Animation
This example shows the position and path of a moving projectile which is launched at a given velocity and angle. The math is high school physics, with a little calculus and trig thrown in. If you want to see that, download the workbook (link below), or consult a textbook or a smart kid.
The workbook has a data entry area and my usual animation controls. When the angle and velocity are entered, a results table shows how long the projectile will be in flight, how long it will take to get to maximum altitude, and what altitude and distance the projectile will reach. Some assumptions were made to simplify the model, as in all physics problems. The ground is flat at sea level, and the effect of air resistance is neglected.
Set the angle to 45° and the velocity to 100 m/s, and start the animation.
Here is the end of the animation for 30° and 7 m/s.
And this one is for 75° and 100 m/s
The workbook containing this model can be downloaded here: Ballistics.zip.
Related Posts:
- Rolling Wheel Animation
- Physics Lesson
- Gapminder for Excel
- Gas Prices – Animated Bar Chart for Excel
- Gas Prices – Interactive Time Series
- Gas Prices – Animated Bar Chart for Excel 2
Posted: Sunday, August 24th, 2008 under Dynamic Charts.
Comments: 1
Comments
Comment from DaleW
Time: Monday, October 19, 2009, 10:24 pm
Jon,
Sometimes — as when GapMinder.org excels — animation is very useful because we’ve run out of spatial dimensions to visualize our data, and we need time to serve as an extra dimension for grasping the effect of time.
Other times — using animation such as this ballistics demo provides — the animation might serve as a cute icebreaker: an orienting introduction that helps draw the audience into considering more complex charts with higher data density.
Thank you for teaching such methods. I’m trying to find situations where such Excel animations could be useful.
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