Basic Projectile Motion

Now that we have a good intuitive understanding of projectile motion, let's understand better how to really model it.

Once we've broken the initial velocity into horizontal and vertical components, we can apply the kinematic equations to each direction independently. This is the key to solving projectile motion problems: treat the horizontal and vertical motions as two separate one-dimensional problems that happen simultaneously.

Once we've broken the initial velocity into horizontal and vertical components, we can then apply kinematic equations to each direction independently. This is the key to solving projectile motion problems: treat the horizontal and vertical motions as two separate one-dimensional problems that happen simultaneously. For the horizontal direction, the motion is uniform (constant velocity) since there's no horizontal acceleration when we ignore air resistance. The horizontal position and velocity are given by: