btrettel's Nerf blog

Do you believe most Nerf darts can be made more stable by spinning? If so, this challenge is for you!

The challenge is simple: Provide objective and statistically significant evidence that spinning darts improves stability, precision, or range.

Some notes

Rifling barrels for Nerf has already been thoroughly debunked. To say it in brief, the vast majority of Nerf darts are already stable, so they  have nothing to gain by spinning. In fact, they have a lot to lose, and this is often ignored by rifling believers.

So far, rifling believers have singularly failed to provide strong evidence to support their claims. Whenever they do, their results are shown to actually not be statistically different than what you would expect from smoothbores.

Also, tests are very often completely subjective. The results of many tests are simply “it looked better.” A subjective test like examining the dart’s trajectory could potentially be useful, but only when the experiment is properly designed. The tests must be blinded to have any shred of objectivity.

I don’t care how the spinning is done as long as the darts can be verified to be spinning too.