ORIGINAL: quiksilver

Yes, Tfox, but if you're playing thosegames with the trajectory - you'd behunting with a bow that hits over 3" hot inside 20 yards (where most actual hunting shots are taken, for me at least). I'll admit that if you fudge your zero out to 27 yds,your trajectoryisn't so bad at 310 (that's still smokin', as far as hunting setups go), but as you drop down under 275, you start to see the numbers getting out of whack pretty fast. I never said that you had a "bad" trajectory. I just said that if you zero at 20 yards, this is what it will be. It is what it is.

IMO, this is where a "hunter" and a "3d shooter" will butt heads.A competitive archer willalmost never take a 6-yard shot at a moving targetfrom a 25' platform, froze solid and running on 3 hours of sleep.They only shoot at non-moving styrofoam between15 and 39 yards... For you guys, one-pin 3+" high at 13 yards doesn't seem so bad. That's where a good 3d setup becomes a bad hunting setup.

3d guys set up for the shots thatthey are most likely to encounter (i.e. - a 28 yard broadside black bear target) - and that's fair. Bowhunters set up for the shots thatthey are most likely to encounter (i.e. - a 9 yard quartering buck - walking away - with 12 seconds to get the shot off - leaning away from the tree to get a clear lane).So, along those lines, I really don't think there's anything wrong with a one-pin hunter being zeroed at 20 yards. That's where most ofmy shotsare... So... It's only natural that we use that as my baseline in the field.

You keep arguing with me here,but I'm not sure what you're arguing about. It is what it is. Every speed and trajectory has its own parabola. The slower it's going, the more drastic the curve. You can play all the games you want with where it's zero'ed, but it doesn't change the fact that the slower it's moving, the worse the trajectory becomes.
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Paul - this chart WILL tell you what the trajectory of any given bow will be. The shaft, fletchings, bow - do NOT matter. Newton's law of falling bodies. The difference between how THIS chart can be accurate, while the "drop speed calculator" will be off is simple: This calculator accounts for your zero and trajectory. The drop calculators just run a generic "9.8 meters per second squared" calculation - working backward from how far it fell, to attain "time in flight" and plugging in the yardage numbers to get a rough guess of speed.
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Burnie: I understand that the speed does degrade, and this chart doesn't account for it. But even if it did, the numbers wouldn't be all that much different. That's why I went out and confirmedmy ownballisticsunder "real world" conditions on my own. There are external factors that influence the numbers in both directions, and the result: it balances out fairly well. It's not exact, but it's as close as you're gonna get without wasting your life doing 30 pages of high-level physics.
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Just so we're all on the same page: A few pages ago, I was the village idiot for coming up with this ridiculous ballistics table. Now that you all have had time to play with your OnTarget software and pick at it - we realize now that the table is indeed correct? But, now we're just saying that my table is unrealistic, because nobody should be out there with just a 20-yard pin.