A launch monitor looks omniscient. Ball leaves the club, and a second later the screen has a dozen numbers on it. It is easy to assume everything you'd want to know was measured, and that a blank field means something broke.
Mostly it means the opposite. Here is what the bay genuinely records, what it records only sometimes, and what it never sees at all — so you can read your own numbers with the right amount of confidence.
Always there: the ball
Three things come off every single shot, with no asterisk.
Ball speed is captured on 100% of shots. It is the one universal strike signal, which is why so much of this app leans on it — it's the only measurement that's never missing.
Launch angle, launch direction, total spin and spin axis are likewise always present. The monitor's whole job is watching the ball leave, and it does that job on every ball.
That's the honest core of your data: how fast it left, where it started, and how it was spinning. Everything else is a maybe.
Usually there: where it finished
Carry is present on shots captured from the Foresight FSX files — which is what most members are looking at most of the time. Total distance is ingested too, and is present on those same FSX shots.
Roll is not measured at all. It's derived: total minus carry, computed when it's shown and never stored as its own number. If both distances are there you get roll for free; if one is missing there is no roll to show, and inventing one would just be arithmetic on a guess.
The trajectory set — offline, apex height, descent angle — sits in the same "usually there" band.
Mostly missing: everything about the club
This is the section worth reading twice, because it explains most blank tiles in the app.
Club speed and smash factor are marker-gated. They are captured only from clubs wearing Foresight markers. On ordinary shots they are materially absent — FSX files miss club speed roughly 94% of the time.
The rest of the club-delivery block — angle of attack, club path, face-to-target, impact position on the face — is gated the same way, and face-to-target is missing around 95% of the time even on FSX shots.
So: if you have never stickered a club, you should expect no smash factor and no path numbers, ever. Not because something is broken. Because nothing measured them.
Never there: the proxy path
Some shots arrive through the GSPro proxy rather than the FSX file watcher. Those carry no club-delivery data at all — 100% missing on carry, face, club speed and spin.
This is the usual answer to "why aren't my distances showing." It's typically not a lost shot; it's a shot that came down the proxy path instead of from FSX. The distances live in the FSX capture, so when FSX isn't capturing, the distances aren't there to display.
Why a blank is the honest answer
The app could fill those gaps. It could model club speed from ball speed, average your way to a smash factor, extrapolate a carry. It deliberately doesn't, and there are guardrails proving it.
Any candidate for a record has to be physically possible: smash no higher than 1.52, ball speed no more than club speed × 1.53, and carry no more than ball speed × 4.5 plus about 9.1 metres of slack. Those bounds exist because on 16 July 2026 this system produced a 365-yard drive from 116 mph of ball speed — a spin dropout that got modelled into a flight that never happened.
A per-club ratio record also needs at least five qualifying shots with that club before it's awarded. And shots flagged as outliers, or ones you've deselected yourself, are excluded from your statistics entirely.
What none of it measures
The bay measures the ball, and — when you've stickered a club — the club. It does not measure you.
It doesn't know whether you were warm, whether that was the shot you meant to hit, or whether you'd have played it that way on grass. It doesn't know the swing you didn't log. And it does not know whose swing it was unless you tell it, which is a whole article of its own.
Read the numbers as what they are: an unusually precise account of a ball's first few seconds, with honest holes where nothing was measured. That's more useful than a complete-looking screen you can't trust.
From the glossary
Related reading: How the App Actually Works · Clean Data In, Clean Numbers Out · Your First Time in a Sim Bay
Why Your Count Looks Low (And Why That's the Honest Answer)
If your record says "38 of 210 in your live era," your first thought is only 38? Fair. And then maybe you remember you've hit way more golf here than 210 swings, and it looks stranger still. Here's the honest breakdown — two reasons your count looks the way it does, and only one of them ever moves.