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What is the terminal velocity of a standard pub dart?

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JonnyBoy12 | 18:28 Sun 06th Sep 2009 | Science
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Everyone knows that a person stupid enough to jump out of a perfectly good aircraft will reach top speed, or terminal velocity, of about 120 miles per hour. What is the terminal velocity of a standard dart I find in a pub if I throw that out of an airplane, which is say 20,000 feet up? What is the speed when it hits the ground, and what could it go through? I would imagine it would go through a person like a hot knife through butter.

Thanks for any sensible replies.
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Without kowing the weight, size, condition, area to wind resistance etc. I don't think it is possible to work it out anywhere near exact, but as a freefall standard average bullet has a TV of about 200mph, I guess a dart would fall at about 250mph. This is not fast enough to go through a person.
The dart, being relatively small, would reach TV even if dropped off a tall building.
Here is a NASA web page with an applet that calculates terminal verocity

http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/k-12/airplane/termv.html

There is a thread here that discusses tranquilised darts as having a drag coefficient of about .2 - I'd imagine the cross-sectional area would be about .000005 square m

So that comes out at about 44m/s or about 98 miles per hour.

Mind you a tranquiliser dart's probably not very aerodynamic - see if you can find the drag coefficient for a standard dart and feed in the figures

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