Came across this. More info here Niklas Roy - Galactic Dimension
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Hah! Beat me to it by an hour! Was just going to post this.
It’s more of a tech demo than a viable game, but still, can’t deny the makery goodness of it all. Pretty neat how the fans blow the ball around instead of bumpers.
Was expecting something that needed a vantage point from 20-50’ to appreciate, ball bearings the size of bowling balls, 3 phase power to hydraulic pumps running the flippers, and spectator safety systems more akin to a NASCAR circuit … but still a neat scaled-up project.
Being that gravity pulls on every object with the same acceleration it would seem that, with respect to the size of the play field, you have a longer time to analyze the path of the ball and therefore it’s easier to time hitting the flippers.
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I can think of a few variables that alter that result, the most important probably being the angle of the playing board. Pinball machines don’t drop the ball straight down at the full 9.8 m/s^2, but across an angled surface. Probably the smaller pinball machines use less slope than this big one does. I expect that final velocity gets quite a bit higher on this machine, too. Then, too, the mass of the flippers increases, which would slow response time, but I suppose the equipment could compensate for that.