So, it’s time for another exciting instalment in this series of blogs, and it is my sincere hope that this one will really help the scientifically-faithful (and, of course, Unicorn-equipped) pilgrim progress toward that elusive sporting heaven of a 9 dart 501.
Well, I certainly do hope that, but let’s be realistic. Apart from the fact that life would need to be pretty tedious for dissertations on dart flight dynamics to be deemed exciting, even a detailed knowledge of the subject isn’t actually going to help some of us do much more than mostly better a 9 dart 78 (which, as fellow darting incompetents everywhere will instantly recognise, is 3 lots of 26!).
Which brings me to my main topic, one so fundamental to these blogs that I make no apologies for re-visiting it. What practical use is all the theory I’ve been blithering on about at such length? Does it really make any difference to results in the real world?
Now this type of question is not exclusive to darts, but can be applied to virtually any field of sporting endeavour. And the answer tends to be the same. An individual’s skill, ability and mental attitude are usually by far the most important factors, but equipment technology and theoretical knowledge can still offer an important edge.
How much of an edge depends on the sport. The Formula 1 fortunes of Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton may be highly dependent on the performance of the cars they drive, but the results of Roger Federer or Tiger Woods are somewhat less so on the exact qualities of their racquet or set of clubs - even though you can bet they’re still pretty picky about them, especially when they’re about to go respectively head-to-head with Rafael Nadal or Phil Mickelson!
In this context, darts is closer to tennis or golf than it is to motor racing. As I said way back in “The Good, the Bad, and the Ungainly”, for a reasonable player a fair estimate of the difference in accuracy between a “good” aerodynamic design of dart and a “bad” one is in the region of 4mm. Admittedly it can be more if your standard is lower, but if your favourite player misses the winning double in the World Final by a good inch, it’s really no good blaming the dart.
Nonetheless, although not even the most aerodynamically advanced (modesty forbad me to put Sigma!) dart can turn someone into Phil Taylor, I’m sure most players would concede that a 4mm difference in accuracy is worth having. In fact, even those people who dismiss darts science as a waste of time will, in the next breath, sagely advise you to change from, say, oval flights to kite, or from aluminium shafts to plastic, or from torpedo barrels to parallel.
Which raises a key question. Short of giving every possible combination of dart barrel, shaft and flights an extensive trial, how can a player get an idea of what is the best combination for them? Wouldn’t a theoretical understanding of the key factors help?
For the aforementioned faithful pilgrim who believes this is indeed the case, there are now two ways to progress. The first is to put on some suitably professorial glasses and, after a careful study of all my blogs, get out a calculator and start working out those moments of inertia and yaw wavelengths. The second is to wait until the updated version of uniLab is up and running (which hopefully will be very soon – the “parcours boys” I talked about last time have been busy!) and simply use that.
I’m pretty sure I know which of these approaches will prove the more popular, but should there be any dedicated readers who do choose the distinctly more arduous first route, I do hope you don’t get Bunyans!
Q & As
Warren and Longer Points
Thanks for being the first (and so far only!) person to post a comment to my opening blog on the new Unicorn website, Warren. As for your question, fitting a longer point will increase the moment of inertia of your dart slightly and also mean that a given impact angle will represent more deviation of the tip – the bit that actually counts for scoring - away from the trajectory of the dart’s centre of gravity. Thus longer points could change a player’s optimal dart configuration. However, as I said to Dianne S in my Q&As to “Blinking Scientist”, this shouldn’t be a crucial factor and it’s more important that your finger is comfortable. Incidentally, the ability to consider different types of point may well be something we will look at for inclusion in future versions of uniLab.