> Speed matters because air resistance increases exponentially with speed No, drag is somewhere between linear and quadratic as a function of speed, not expone

> Speed matters because air resistance increases exponentially with speed No, drag is somewhere between linear and quadratic as a function of speed, not exponential. (Although it gets weird around the speed of doing.) Heuristically, if you’re pushing through a cloud of particles, the number of particles you hit per unit time is linear with speed, and the impulse per particle is also linear with speed (because it’s the difference between your velocity and the particle’s initial velocity, times the particle’s mass, times a constant that’s around two for an elastic collision).