Help me geeks, you're my only hope (physics "riddle" inside)

Today I came to work, poured coffee, broke the office record and proclaimed to the world, that I was going home since I had nothing more to accomplish that day.
Then the bastard at #14 posted his record and I sat down and spent most of the day alternately trying and crying.

Good thing our foreign editors were visiting today, so they could see how hardworking we are on a typical day…

I shall now try this for hours cries

Argh. Working on that, I can get better airtime than ever before, but it loses momentum almost immediately on the ground.

Alright, I think this is it for the day, as I can’t seem to get results better than this with my current design:

Maybe tomorrow I’ll try a completely new design, rather than variants of this one.

Fucking assholes. I played this for like 20 minutes last night and swore it off because it’s stupid and dumb, and now I gotta load it up again after looking at these plans and getting my own ideas.

Time to “Start Spillet” or whatever the fuck that means.

I’m just pleased that this is pissing somebody else than me off.

(It’s means “start game”)

I’m pretty terrible at this game, but one thing I found you can do is place the cake (or whatever the brown square thing on the right side of the screen is) directly underneath/inside the orange and have them both fall onto the lever. The orange is 294gr and the cake is 311gr.

I managed second place in the office with 576 centimeters and decided I’d fuckin’ had it with that fucking game. Then a new player entered and hit 829 cm.
… so I killed him.

The plane takes off.

I’d play it but it’s in some crazy, long dead language.

Just a quick update.
We involved our hardware tester… the one guy with only a high school education and after a weekend he had not only beaten everybody at work, but also made the top score overall and was the first ever to crack 10 meters. And while we tried all kinds of elaborate designs, his was a simple two-pencil catapult (technically a seesaw, right?!)

Current theory by the colleague in the lead is that the physics are somewhat wonky so the other stuff makes a difference even when not touching the setup at all, which is why there’s stuff hanging in the air to the sides.

Since you get one ticket for the final iPad-draw for each week you place in the top 20 there’s a good chance it will be one from our magazine - I just hope it is and that they interview the winner. The site is run by an union and aimed at anybody with an engineering degree which none of us have. Far from it.

Julesokken was the one to crack the design.
Stjef is the journalist (and English major) in the lead.
… and I’m Hanzii.

That’s brilliant, actually.

I tried to make something like that happen but could never figure out how to set it up properly. The two pencils and the heavy cake seemed like they should get involved, that’s a great setup with the eraser balancing the pencils.

H.

Funnily enough the guy on top, Stjef, won two cinema tickets in the weekly draw.
Then minutes later a press release ticked into our office telling about the game and and how it had come to their notice that it had gained popularity outside the intended audience of engineers and would we like to test it?
Stjef replied that we knew a bit about it and a test was probably a bit too much for us, but we would do a news item… and then he signed it “Current no. 1 on the leaderboard”.

At least I thought the coincidence was funny.

heh! That’s funny