An inclined plane, three solenoids and a plumb bob. Shoot again.
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How to play
Plunger — hold Space or ↓ to pull, let go to shoot. A full pull runs the top channel and comes back down a side wire to an inlane. A softer pull drops the ball through one of the three top lanes into the bumper nest.
Flippers — ← / Z / A for the left, → / / / L for the right. Where along the bat you catch the ball decides how fast it leaves; the tip is the fast end.
Nudge — C left, V forward, B right. The nudge pushes the ball and swings the tilt bob. Nudging in rhythm with the bob is how you tilt.
Camera — 1 player, 2 low, 3 overhead. P pauses, N starts a new game, H opens this panel.
What scores
Complete the three top lanes to raise the bonus multiplier.
Knock down the three drop targets to light the left kickback and the lock.
The saucer locks a ball when the lock is lit; three locks start multiball.
The left ramp climbs to the raised deck; the deck drops the ball onto the wire that returns it to the right inlane. Back-to-back ramps build a combo.
Plunge into the lit top lane for the skill shot.
What the machine actually does
A pinball table is not a box of bouncing. It is a ball on an inclined plane acted on by powered actuators, and almost everything that makes the game feel the way it does comes from that one sentence.
The plane. The playfield is tilted back, so gravity splits into a constant pull toward the drain and a constant press onto the wood. A ball rolling freely accelerates down the pitch at a fixed rate, and that rate is the fingerprint this app checks itself against: the harness takes a track of positions the engine emitted, fits a parabola to it, and recovers the pitch you set on the slider.
Sliding, then rolling. A ball leaving the plunger or a flipper has no spin. It slides under kinetic friction until the no-slip condition is met, and only then rolls. That transition has a closed-form time and distance, and it is why the first part of a plunge behaves differently from the rest of it.
The coils put energy in. A pop bumper is fired by a position switch under its skirt and driven by a solenoid. Nothing in that chain measures how fast the ball arrived, so the impulse is set by the coil — and a slow ball leaves a bumper faster than it came in. No restitution model can do that; the numbers below say by how much.
The flipper is a motor, not a wall. The bat turns about a pivot with its own moment of inertia, driven by a strong power winding to the end-of-stroke switch and held there by a weak one. Catch the ball at the base and it leaves slowly; catch it at the tip and it leaves fast. That difference is the sport.
Tilt is a pendulum. A plumb bob hangs through a metal ring. A nudge swings it; if the swing reaches the ring, the switch closes and you get a warning. Because it is a pendulum and not a counter, nudges that land in step with its swing add up and nudges that land against it cancel out.
Limits, and every number this page quotes
Everything below is measured from the engine that is running on this page, not typed in by
hand. tools-harness-page.js re-measures each tagged figure against the engine and
fails the build if the page and the physics have drifted apart.
The ball and the table
Ball diameter 26.99 mm — that is 1‑1/16 inch, the size a standard pinball is sold as.
Ball mass 80.79 g. Not a citation: it is that diameter times the density of carbon steel, which is the assumption stated in CREDITS.txt.
Playfield pitch 6.5° by default, adjustable from 3° to 8°.
Playfield 520.7 mm across and 1065 mm to the apex of the top arc. Those are this table's own dimensions, not a standard.
Flipper bat 76.2 mm, the 3 inch part, sweeping 60°.
The raised deck sits 85 mm above the playfield.
What the physics actually produces
A freely rolling ball accelerates down the default pitch at 0.793 m/s². Nothing sets that number; it falls out of the contact torque and the sphere's moment of inertia.
A ball set sliding on a level surface ends up rolling at 71.43 % of its launch speed, which is the closed-form answer for a uniform sphere.
A full plunge leaves the shooter rod at 3.51 m/s.
The fastest the table gets a ball moving, measured over a played game, is 4.95 m/s.
The solenoids — where a pinball table stops being passive
Over approach speeds from 0.32 to 6.19 m/s, a pop bumper returns the ball at between 3.20 and 4.08 m/s. The exit speed is set by the coil, not by the approach.
The slowest ball measured leaves 9.97 times faster than it arrived. A restitution model cannot exceed 1.
Below an approach of 3.71 m/s every ball leaves faster than it arrived; above it, the bumper slows the ball down.
A tip strike leaves 3.91 times faster than a base strike at the same bat rate.
The unloaded flipper stroke takes 26.8 ms.
The tilt, the ramp and the rules
The plumb bob's period is 0.6035 s hung normally and 0.4371 s inverted. It reaches the ring at 6.525°.
Energy alone says the ramp cannot be crested below 1.219 m/s; the engine's measured threshold is 1.242 m/s, the difference being the rail's drag.
3 balls, 2 tilt warnings before the tilt, extra balls off — the settings the unified IFPA/PAPA tournament rules list.
Ball save runs for 7 s. That is this table's choice: the rules leave ball savers at factory settings and do not state one.
A ball that closes no switch for 8 s triggers a ball search; after 4 fruitless searches the ball is taken out and a fresh one served, which is the software equivalent of opening the machine.
What is wrong with it, or unproven
The physics runs at a fixed 1920 Hz. At the fastest speed the table produces, the ball crosses 19.1 % of its own radius in one step, so contacts are found by overlap rather than by solving for the instant of impact. A grazing hit can therefore be resolved a fraction of a millimetre late.
There is no one-way gate on the shooter lane. Every placement of one left a pocket a ball could sit in forever, so this table behaves like an older machine without one: a ball that comes back down the lane is yours to shoot again.
Friction, restitution, coil impulses and the flipper's inertia are calibrated, not sourced. No manufacturer publishes them. They were chosen so that measured behaviour — stroke time, exit speeds, how a ramp shot feels — lands where a machine lands.
The tilt bob's ring strike is modelled with a restitution, so a big swing dies in a few contacts while a small one rings on. Service guidance describes a bob that can swing for minutes; a bob that stayed in contact with the ring that long would hand out hundreds of warnings, which no machine does. The two are reconciled by putting the loss in the strike, and that reconciliation is this app's, not a published one.
Ball-to-ball contact in multiball is frictionless and does not transfer spin.
The ball never leaves the playfield plane except on a rail or after a bumper kick; there is no airball off a ramp edge.
There is no sound.
About this app
Pinball is the name of the game itself, not of any one machine. This is an independent
reimplementation of the published physics and conventions of a pinball machine —
the inclined playfield, the plunger, the top lanes, the pop bumper nest, the slingshots, two
3 inch flippers over a drain with an inlane and an outlane either side, a ramp to a raised
deck, a drop-target bank, and a plumb-bob tilt. The table layout, the shot names, the scoring
and the artwork are this app's own.
No commercial machine is reproduced. No manufacturer's playfield, artwork, rule set or
trade dress appears here, and none was used as a reference. Pinball as a game is not any one
company's; the particular machines are, and this app stays away from them.
What it is built from: the unified IFPA/PAPA competition rules for the machine settings and
the tilt and stuck-ball procedure; the encyclopaedic and service literature for the 6.5°
playfield convention, the 1‑1/16 inch ball, the 3 inch flipper bat, the pop
bumper mechanism, the two-winding flipper coil and the plumb-bob tilt. Every source that could
be opened is listed with its URL in CREDITS.txt, along with the things one might
expect to find in those rules that are simply not there.
Everything runs in your browser. This page makes no network requests, loads nothing from a
CDN, calls no model, and stores nothing but your best score and your setup in this browser.