How to Fix Projectile Air Drag Making It Stop Too Fast

A projectile that launches well but bleeds off speed like it hit molasses is being killed by the rigidbody's linear damping, which is a crude exponential brake. Real aerodynamic drag behaves differently. Here is how to fix it.

How to fix it

1. Lower the linear damping

Engine drag/linearDamping applies a per-step exponential decay that scales badly with speed. Set it near zero and model drag yourself for predictable, tunable behavior.

2. Apply velocity-squared drag

Each FixedUpdate apply a force -0.5 * rho * Cd * A * speed^2 * velocityDir. This quadratic drag matches real air, braking fast projectiles hard but barely touching slow ones.

3. Tune for the intended range

Pick the drag coefficient so the projectile keeps enough speed over its expected travel distance; verify by plotting velocity over time rather than eyeballing a single shot.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.