Banana ballistics: reading the wind and hitting your target
A practical guide to the physics of QBasic Gorillas: how angle and power combine, how to compensate for wind, and how to use the skyline as a weapon instead of an obstacle.
Most matches are lost before the first throw: players change three things at once, see the banana miss, and learn nothing. Ballistics rewards patience. Here is how to think about the shot.
The path is a parabola
A banana leaves the gorilla at an angle, at a speed set by the power slider, and then only two things act on it: gravity pulls it down, and the wind pushes it sideways. The result is a parabola bent by the wind. Understanding that shape is most of the game.
Angle and power are two dials on one thing
The same target can be hit with a low, fast shot or a high, slow lob. They are not interchangeable. The low shot arrives sooner and is less exposed to wind; the high lob clears buildings and drops in from above, but the wind has far more time to move it. Choose the shot your skyline allows, then tune one dial at a time.
Reading the wind
The arrow in the readout gives direction and strength. The habit worth building is to aim into the wind by a little more than feels right on long shots, and to remember that the correction is not linear: the longer the banana is in the air, the more the wind moves it. A tailwind helps a soft lob enormously and barely touches a flat shot.
Use the buildings
Every explosion removes terrain, and that terrain is permanent. A hole you make in a tower on turn two is a tunnel on turn six. Two uses are worth practising: digging through a wall that hides the other gorilla, and opening a vertical shaft so that a later shot can be dropped almost straight down, where the wind cannot reach it.
A drill that works
- Start with a mid angle and mid power.
- Throw once. Read whether the banana fell short or overshot, and whether the wind pushed it.
- Change one thing only, in the direction of the miss.
- Repeat, narrowing the error each round.
- Once you are close, stop touching the angle and let power do the last of the work.
The players who look like they are guessing are usually doing exactly this, faster, because they have learned how much a given wind is worth. That number is the whole skill.