Highlights
- Zonai rockets in Tears of the Kingdom can propel Link higher when attached to carts at an angle rather than vertically.
- Adding more rockets to the cart doesn't significantly increase height due to the speed limit of the rockets themselves.
- Rocket angle affects speed limit and adjusting it can result in increased acceleration and ascent altitude, as shown in divlogue's experiments.
An eagle-eyed Tears of the Kingdom fan discovered an interesting feature of the Zonai rockets. When these rockets are attached to carts or platforms at a certain angle, they will propel Link higher into the air than if a rocket is simply attached upside down without an angle.
In the Reddit video showing the discovery, user 24GamingYT performed two experiments. The first is an experiment where they attached a rocket in a vertical position to a horizontal Zonai cart and then tried to launch it. The result here is that the height of the launch reached about 811 meters before the rocket disappeared.
The user then followed up with another experiment in which the rocket was attached to the same cart, but not vertically, more at an angle. Apparently, this allowed the cart to jump 40 meters higher than the previous launch.
After that, the user tried attaching more than one angled rocket to the cart, but the height didn't change much and the rockets disappeared very quickly.
The reason why adding more rockets is useless is, as lucygracenelson pointed out, because of the speed limit of the rockets themselves. Adding more rockets to increase the speed or height of the launched cart is like pedaling a bike really fast downhill—eventually you can't pedal any faster because you've reached the maximum speed the pedals or bike can go.
As for the angle, the trick here is that the speed limit of rockets is determined by the direction they are pointing at, not how much they are pushing, so changing that direction can affect the speed. A rocket pointing at an angle will register a lower internal speed than a rocket pointing straight, which in turn leaves more room for acceleration. Though it would be more accurate to say that the rocket's speed reading decreases because it's dividing its thrust between lifting the cart upward and pushing it in the angled direction.
With this in mind, one fan, divlogue, thought to make the best of both worlds. They would indeed get more acceleration by having the rocket at an angle, but only slightly so that the shared thrust wouldn't be too much, and the result is that smaller angle rocket combinations can actually increase ascent altitude, as seen in divlogue's experiments here and here.