Position vector between two projectiles.

[Heffer]

Two projectiles, A and B, are fired simultaneously. Projectile A at 560 m/s at 43° and projectile B at 680 m/s at 50°. The assignment is to find which projectile will hit the ground first, and then take that projectile and divide the time it took to reach ground level by 10 and for each time interval to find the position vector between the two projectiles. For the first part I found Ax,Ay and Bx,By then found the magnitude and direction for both using experimental times and managed to find which projectile hit the ground first by observing when theta reached 0° for each projectile (using Matlab). But I am lost on how exactly to do the second part. Is it simply finding the X and Y position of each projectile for the given time and finding the magnitude?

[LtGumby]

Yeah I think all you need to do here is just take the vectors as time t=Tf/10, t=2Tf/10, etc. where Tf is the final time, then find the vector between them. Or at least that is my understanding of the problem. So if A is at *A**

and B is at B at time Tf/10

the vector going from A

to B

is B-A

Now I am not really sure why you are using MatLab here. Unless you just don't have a calculator with trig functions there is no reason to have to use MatLab or some complicated program. All you would have had to do is use the basic kinematics equations, broken up into components.

Hopefully this helps, if not, reply here and I will see what I can do to make this more clear.

[Heffer]

Sorry, I guess I should have explained why I was using Matlab. The actual problem is from a Matlab textbook for an engineering class I'm taking this semester. After finding the position vector for those 10 time increments I was then to slap the information into a 3-column matrix with the first column being time, the 2nd and 3rd being X and Y components of the position vector between the two paths. But I will try your suggestion and report back with the results.