Hi!
As the title suggests, my question concerns the trajectory of a jet of water, for example arising from water flowing out of a vessel with a hole in it. The standard approach to this phenomenon would be to treat the jet of water as undergoing free fall, and approximating its trajectory by a quadratic curve.
However, I have some doubts about the validity of this model, specificially, the assumption that the water of the jet undergoes free fall. There are obviously internal forces in the jet of water, so when concidering a small segment of said jet, there is, in my opinion, not only the force of gravity to consider, and therefore we are not dealing with free fall.
Any attempts at shedding some light on this issue are most welcome.