A very varied set of answers, which is nice. It was good to see the different methods of holding the 3 balls in the tube. I have to say a lot of my attempts failed because the Green just beat the Purple, which promptly dropped and failed.
First, then, and very important, the Heath-Robinson award for the most interesting low score answer goes to KuzyaHG for a brilliant contrived firstattempt which has lots of the good old historic stuff, including timers and pulleys. All it needed was a railway.
Wonderful ! I just wish we got more like this every time.
And no sooner had I wished that than bythelee worked an extraordinarily neat solution (with a nod to the mars sky-crane) that deliberately uses absolutely everything – timers, tension, and every material – harder than building an economic version. Just watch the coloured ball return.
So, eat your heart out those who didn’t put in any just-get-there solution !
Meanwhile, in the serious business of winning, bythelee answered very quickly with the Sparkler, closely followed by Andrew – both predicting they would fizzle out. Indeed, they were both overtaken comfortably by Kuzya(“its-so-hard”)HG.Then Alex sent an entry with a fascinating re-use of the slingshot to catch an errant Purple – worth a look
But, despite a late tweak by KuzyaHG, bythelee burst to the front by replacing the rockets with elastic for a great 3346 subsequently bumped to 3362 – astonishingly with no timers!
So the winner is bythelee with 3362.
Thanks to those who found rocket solutions, and especially those who tried multiple variants. It was good to see elastic and timers in there, too, and especially no weird force stuff.
I hope you enjoyed a different style of puzzle.