Structured barrels are a relatively recent development and interesting in and of themselves. One of the main objectives is to eliminate barrel harmonics that distort accuracy. The article didn't provide much info on the structured barrel used to break the record, so here's some from the only company I'm aware of that specializes in making them:
> traveling at a downward angle and about 600 feet per second as they reached the target zone.
That is incredible. Some BB guns don't even fire horizontally that fast
> Regarding it taking 69 shots to hit the mark, with all the variables that had to be taken into account, “we were thrilled it was so few,” Humphries said.
Just to clarify, I'm pretty sure they're saying that the bullet left the muzzle at 3,300 fps and had decelerated down to 600 fps at time of impact, not that it was moving vertically at 600 feet per second. So the fact that it was moving faster than a BB gun isn't really shocking.
> The shot was made with a custom-built rifle chambered for the .416 Barrett cartridge
That's a huge bullet that was specifically designed for low-supersonic drag and extreme long range. It has a huge amount of energy at the muzzle... (8,767.4 ft-lb or 11,887 J according to wikipedia[1]) so ~600fps down range, even at 4.4 miles, is not that surprising.
The only surprising feat here is they managed to actually hit a target... which is quite incredible.
Assuming the bullet is traveling on a purely ballistic trajectory, no weird aerodynamics, calculator is saying it will have a vertical delta V of -235 m/s at 24 seconds. So more like -700 ft/s. But friction is real so I don’t know the real number.
I’m quite surprised they didn’t have the barrel pointed higher. Was the shooter on a plateau?
The angle between the barrel and the scope is already pretty extreme for a rifle. Can’t imagine it being particularly pleasant to shoot with the scope mounted at the sort of angle you’d need for the shot you’re describing.
I doubt we do. That would take out all forms of bird hunting. Most firearm owner's and hunters I know would say "Shooting in the air is a waste of ammunition and stupid - unless there was a target there."
They would also be impressed. I am. I never thought this would get to HN. Really nerding out on some of the math and insight that has been commented on here.
At these ranges, wind, heat, humidity and more play huge factors into the bullet's trajectory. I highly doubt even a bench rest would yield anything resembling a group at this range.
It's been tried, but I'm not sure how successful they are/were. Modern day military artillery has "smart shells"[1] as well, which can move small deflection surfaces to "steer" the shell towards it's target.
I do not know the limits of these systems... and of course they would be exceedingly expensive for your average sport shooter.
AFAIU, Russia doesn't have any munitions comparable to these guided artillery shells or even the guided HIMARS rockets. Arguably these deployments in Ukraine may inch Russia a little closer to resorting to tactical nukes. Their military doctrine relies on tactical nukes as an answer to conventional weapons beyond their own capability, and that's part of the reason Russia has so many tactical nukes deployed (at least at sea).
> The U.S. has apparently sent M982 Excalibur shells to Ukraine, according to leaked budget documents
The DOD straight up announced that a recent military aid package included 1000 M982 Excalibur rounds. Another thing the US has been providing is M1156 PGK. It's a kit used to make unguided rounds more precise by adding GPS guidance and it dramatically reduces long range CEP.
Anecdotally I have noticed a large increase the frequency single shot artillery strikes on Russian tanks appearing in Telegram videos. Previously it would take a few shots to adjust fire. Now it's often boom! tank gone with no previous impacts evident.
> AFAIU, Russia doesn't have any munitions comparable to these guided artillery shells or even the guided HIMARS rockets. Arguably these deployments in Ukraine may inch Russia a little closer to resorting to tactical nukes. Their military doctrine relies on tactical nukes as an answer to conventional weapons beyond their own capability, and that's part of the reason Russia has so many tactical nukes deployed (at least at sea).
What, Russias nuclear doctrine is to use nukes against the threatening of their own sovereignty and borders, not against conventional weapons that are better than theres.
What kind of pathetic military has a nuclear doctrine to drop nukes because the other country has modern technology?.
It doesn't matter anyway because Russias nukes are just for sabre rattling, Russia knows full well the any use of nuclear weapons, tactical or not in Ukraine will bring an overwhelming response that will likely just straight up end the war in Ukraines favour.
I think you might be confusing tactical and strategic nuclear weapons. As far as I know strategic weapons are only for protecting their sovereignty and the use of tactical weapons is potentially more flexible.
> I think you might be confusing tactical and strategic nuclear weapons. As far as I know strategic weapons are only for protecting their sovereignty and the use of tactical weapons is potentially more flexible.
I don't believe their doctrine makes a distinction, because the rest of the world would not make a huge distinction.
Im happy to be wrong thought if you could link a primary source.
Russia (and before that, the USSR) viewed nuclear weapons as just another form of artillery. The US did as well, between Davey Crockets, SADM, Pershing 2 and GLCM.
The US doesn’t differentiate between those two cases, and thus a “tactical” strike from the Russian pov would lead to a massive escalation.
Putin should remember that US doctrine explicitly approves massive nuclear first strikes when a situation appears to be escalating to nuclear conflict. Plus the US actually has thousands of mission-ready nukes and only two cities to hit.
Strongly disagree about tactical nuclear weapons; I consider it extremely unlikely that these will be ever used by anyone- way to much escalation for very little gain.
Russia has laser-guided weapons, which have been around for decades. GPS-guided artillery and rockets are relatively new. According to Wikipedia, they were developed because laser-guidance turned out to be too cumbersome in Afghanistan, where the Taliban might be too well concealed or too far away for convenient laser targeting. Perhaps drones and fancier features (e.g. top attack flight modes) make laser guidance more effective than before (presuming the Russian versions can benefit from such technologies), but M982 GPS-guided shells have a range of 25+ miles, and HIMARS GPS-guided rockets 50+ miles (up to 120), which provide huge advantages in distance in addition to not needing a laser designator on the target the entire time.
There's also Strix[1], a self-guiding anti-armor mortar round. Not actually sure when it was taken into use, I recall hearing rumours about it being in development in the late 80s, and the Swedish model designation (m/94) indicates it was accepted in 1994.
But, 120 mm is a lot bigger than anything I'd be comfortable firing from a rifle.
All the available information is several years old, now. I figure either the EXACTO (or successor) has secretly been deployed, or it proved impractical.
It may have fallen into the category of weapons too big to lug around, and inferior to vehicle-mounted systems. That's happened before. About 10 years ago, the USMC was trying out an "automatic mortar". This accepted fire direction like artillery - forward observer designates target, data is passed to weapon, weapon duly clobbers target. Worked OK, too heavy for infantry, and there are vehicle-mounted systems already deployed which can do that job.
There shouldn't be any limit to the distance of a rifle shot along a parabolic trajectory if someone builds an appropriate cannon and can shoot many times aye? Artillery shoots much further...
Is there a restriction which prevents a motivated team that can manufacture their own barrels from building a rifle/howitzer hybrid?
This record is only somewhat a record because it’s done with a rifle firing an ammunition sized for a rifle. By the standard of artillery, there is nothing remarkable here.
The criteria used here are very arbitrary. That’s why they can beat their own record by 43% years after setting it. No one is really interested in doing what they are doing because that’s not really interesting.
Is this an engineering challenge or a marksmanship challenge?
Like... Could you just fire the gun, then put the target where the bullet went an fire again and say its mission accomplished because the real goal is just setting up a gun that stable and precise and deterministic?
>Like... Could you just fire the gun, then put the target where the bullet went an fire again and say its mission accomplished because the real goal is just setting up a gun that stable and precise and deterministic?
No... slight variations in wind and atmospherics across that distance change too rapidly and significantly to make that viable. (Also, you wouldn't need to, you'd just adjust the windage/elevation on the optics and/or fancy rifle mount.)
Also the when the bullet drops from supersonic to subsonic speed, there is a non-deterministic kick that it receives which dramatically reduces accuracy beyond that distance.
>Also the when the bullet drops from supersonic to subsonic speed, there is a non-deterministic kick that it receives which dramatically reduces accuracy beyond that distance.
Fun fact, while video games typically depict suppressors as slowing bullets down, and lowering range (presumably with subsonic ammo). A lot of rifles are actually have slightly longer range with a suppressor and standard ammo because it allows the powder to burn more completely with a slightly higher muzzle velocity and therefore it takes longer to hit that subsonic transition
Very likely deterministic if you knew the _exact_ state of both the bullet and the air, but effectively impossible to know and likely not that easy to model correctly even if you did.
As far as we know, quantum nondeterminism is real nondeterminism, not just nondeterministic because you don't know the exact state of both the electron and the slits.
Presumably the Navier–Stokes chaos of turbulent flow will eventually amplify quantum fluctuations (where two molecules do or don't interact) into macroscopically divergent fluid dynamic behavior, but I don't know if the relevant Lyapunov time is short enough to make a bullet's flight quantum nondeterministic.
I doubt it. The bullet movement may be chaotic, which means that tiny changes in initial conditions will drastically affect the trajectory, but it is theoretically possible to predict the trajectory. However, it is likely that quantum effects such as the movement of an electron through slits is actually non-deterministic, so we can only predict it in a statistical way even in principle.
Non-deterministic in the extreme literal sense. Our (turbulent) atmosphere is chaotic, and the transsonic shock is a fluid dynamics problem happening in that chaotic environment.
Even with a perfectly still atmosphere it'd probably be fairly difficult to predict.
> No... slight variations in wind and atmospherics across that distance change too rapidly and significantly to make that viable.
This doesn't sound right. If it's true, then the same thing -- slight variations over time in wind and atmospherics across a seven kilometer span -- would make the aimed shot nonviable too. The shooter isn't adjusting for air movement between himself and the target -- because that can't be done -- so if he's hitting the target reliably, the air movement can't really matter.
Even at 500-700 yards, wind holds can be significant (as in off target). That changes second by second. I can tell you that even as a decent shooter with a better spotter, when the spotter makes a wind call, the slight 1-2 second delay before I can actually press off the shot can be enough where I need to change the hold slightly from what he said to make a good hit.
Over this distance, there will undoubtedly be some fishtail winds and dead spots that are changing on a per second basis. In this case, I'd expect you have a team of spotters reading the mirage at several distances to target, and one lead spotter that is integrating those into the wind call for the shooter.
There's also some new tech that's aimed at this problem actually where instead of getting a wind read at one distance, it measures the wind over the entire distance and gives you a hold based on that. Very fancy stuff, they may have used that in this case.
But given the precision required, wouldn't it make more sense to aim the gun where it would hit the target given median atmospheric conditions and then just fire with that exact aim until it does? Like you couldn't possibly dynamically aim to accommodate that.
>Like you couldn't possibly dynamically aim to accommodate that.
Yes, you can.
Not doing so would result in dramatically reduced accuracy.
That's just windage 101.
The horizontal variation due to even slight wind is massive at this distance and would dwarf all other factors. Failing to adjust for this on a per shot basis would result in dramatically reduced accuracy.
Seems to me you would not be able to adapt your aim to the wind to the level of precision required to hit a small target. You would be much better off trying to identify a working shot for an average wind condition and then trying to time your shot to match that condition.
Impressive that they were able to control things well enough that it only took 69 tries. (Vs. 69,000 or so.)
(Yes, statistical "proof" that it wasn't 10,000-to-1 luck would require far more experimental data. With their setup, that wouldn't be quick or cheap to get.)
> Yes, statistical "proof" that it wasn't 10,000-to-1 luck would require far more experimental data. With their setup, that wouldn't be quick or cheap to get.
Saying that this wouldn't be quick or cheap to get is just an admission that you think it was 10,000-to-1 luck. Why wouldn't it be quick?
Read the article more carefully. Their hugely customized "gun" was only capable of 1 shot every 2 or 3 minutes (to limit heating and thermal expansion ). They had 5 spotters near the target, watching where every individual bullet landed. (Then reporting back to the shooter, so he(?) could make little adjustments.) And it sure looks like an amateur group of "extreme" performance enthusiasts - so who would pay for the collection of a large (say, n=25,000) data set? From a quick web search, just the ammunition (.416 Barrett) would cost ~$400,000. The barrel of their extreme-performance "gun" might need replacing a dozen times or more, and...
The probability of a 1 in 10000 event occurring in the first 69 attempts by chance is about 0.7%.
The 1 in 10000 probability seems arbitrary and underestimated in my opinion though. What would that even mean? The probability of hitting the target with random aiming or purposeful aiming from a fresh start? The probability of hitting the target with a perfected aim and relying on random variance? The probability of doing it without the engineered gun?
ok wind aside, if that's true, how is it possible to aim it then? It can't possibly be true that you can precisely adjust your aim to hit a specific target if you can't even hit the same target by not changing your aim?
But that means the approach described above works perfectly. Fire the gun. Place a bullseye over the bullet hole. Then keep firing the gun until you hit the bullseye "again".
Well, if you consider that "perfectly," yes, but it could take all day. The ancestor post seemed to be suggesting that if it was so "stable, precise and deterministic" that you could do this trivially in a couple shots.
Both - the firearm has to be incredibly precise, but you also have to take into account wind and air density to get that much accuracy, and a big portion of marksmanship is accounting for those. Knowing that you'll have a temperature change over a body of water, and how to adjust for that, for example.
But I can't imagine you're dynamically adjusting each shot for these changing factors every time. You'll almost certainly be holding the aim fixed once you've figured it out to be approximately correct, and firing against natural variance in the variable conditions.
Maybe moving the target to the bullet impact would work - walk the shot to the target or the target to the shot? Both still have many other variables - but there is one good reason why they moved the shot instead of the target.
It would be very difficult to find impact points of the misses - The best they could do was listen for where they hit.
But surely that only refers to the first bundle of shots while trying to guess and check where the gun is aiming? If your ability to tell where the last shot landed was so low on the previous shot, your ability to precisely calibrate and hit a small target on the next shot must be zero.
* I am more amazed at the quality of the scope that the shooter could place a bullet on a 8" bullseye at a distance of 7.08km. There must be something fascinating to it since, Rayleigh's criterion for resolving two points puts some physical limits to the aperture. To resolve a palm sized mark, you need a sufficiently large aperture on telescope & that's not easy to mount/operate.
* This is one of the neatest images I have seen of the effect of rifling on the bullet, in addition to the thermochemical effect on the bullet tip. The tip at that distance & time of flight goes through sustained heating & there is some evidence of rapid oxidation - much like a piece of metal exposed for few seconds to blowtorch.
Anything more expensive available for civilians is generally thermal or night vision, it's easy to spend $6k-8k on a scope with half the zoom but thermal 640x384 sensor capabilities.
People use $4000-9000 thermal scopes at much less zoom and much shorter ranges under 400 yards shooting feral hogs in Texas.
They aren't quite at the top-end price of traditional scopes. Hensoldt makes scopes that go for almost $8k.
They aren't aiming for a 4-6 inch target though (I seriously doubt you could even see that with 35x at 4.5 miles). They are aiming for the center of a target 7.5 feet by 10 feet.
The difference between that 8k scope and this 4k scope is mostly a tiny bit of clarity and last 2-3% of fit and finish. Neither of these would affect scope accuracy and the clarity wouldn't exist at that range anyway due to particles in the air. No purpose in special ordering one and blowing 4k that could be spent elsewhere on something that won't impact the actual shot.
given that this devices was successfully used for such a long distance shot and chosen by people capable of that type of a feat it is questionable for someone else to say that there's something "better". with regard to aiming on long distance - how can there something be better? maybe you meant to state that you own models which are better suited for your specific use case.
There are about a dozen objectively better scopes than this. It’s stunningly obvious you aren’t a long range shooter.
The logic doesn’t hold water. If I win a competition with x scope, it doesn’t mean there aren’t better ones; it just means I didn’t use y when I did some thing.
I have Nightforce ATACR 7-35x56 and Khales that are both objectively better optics than the Vortex Razor HD III.
But yea, maybe check out “what the pros use” for ELR, the Vortex line is a distant third.
so, you think they could have achieved a more impressive result by choosing a better scope of your choice? you should let them know. they are probably already waiting for your opinion!
That looks like rusted iron residue transferred from the sheet metal backing of the target. They had a board down the middle that they had to cut away to extract the bullet so it was encased in the wood for a while with vaporized metal and water before they got it out.
I don't see where they tell us what bullet they used, but it's hinted at being a copper jacketed/bonded lead bullet.
So we're seeing copper, and black residue from barrel fouling, aka. powder residue from inside the barrel's rifling. You should be able to wash and/or tumble most of the residue off the bullet and get something shiny out of it.
"The .416 Barrett cartridge is made by “necking down” a .50 Browning Machine Gun (BMG) round to accommodate the roughly .40-caliber bullet. It’s a relatively short, stout bullet that proved ideal for its purpose, Humphries said."
That doesn't tell us what bullet was used... that only tells us what caliber and weight was used.
There are many bullet designs and materials. Additionally, the cartridge powder load will matter for ultra-long range shots like this too, so knowing what brand of powder, model and how many grains would be helpful too.
A shot like this almost certainly used a hand-assembled, custom round. But the bullet itself is probably "off the shelf" and so would be the powder and case too.
The exact combination might be their "secret sauce" though... long range folks get weird about this stuff.
I am pretty sure in this case the scope is used just like scopes on artillery. You would be interested how artillery scopes resolve from tens of kilometers? They do not.
That's why they had the 12 foot by 7.5 foot white billboard. They aim at the fuzzy white thing and rely on their eyes to interpolate for what the scope can't actually see.
artillery can rarely see their target. My understanding is they use a reference point they place near by and are good at turning offsets to this to the correct angle and powder charge to reach the target. it helps to have an observer that can see the target the can provide aim adjust feedback.
Note that they can do direct fire missions where the target is sighted directly. but I think that is considered too damn close when that happens.
Also note that tanks(a direct fire device) have been known to engage targets at 4+ kilometers. Probably a case of a large stable mount, and a good targeting computer.
A fun fact, computing artillery tables was the primary task of some of the first electronic computers.
Rayleigh's criterion doesn't hard limit your ability to aim-- so long as you have a good prior what the image plane projection of the target is.
To give a contrived example. Say we have a function f(x) == a*exp(-(x-m)^2). I evaluate f(x) at 1 and 2 and tell you that the evaluations are f(1)=0.27093242847450331643480903517 and f(2)=1.1666240719274935885932696286. From that, you can tell me the amplitude (a) and peak position (m) with on the order of 100 bits of precision (in this example).
This is contrived because its noiseless and you know the system response perfectly, but I think it demonstrates that an alignment under assumptions need not be limited by rayleigh's criterion.
For this kind of experiment, do you even need a scope?
(Asking as a complete noob).
It seems what you need most of all, is the ability to make the most minute of adjustments to the aim of the rifle, combined with feedback on where the last bullet landed relative to the target.
Then it becomes a bit like Newton-Raphson approximation.
Or are the conditions on the record such that each successive firing must aim from scratch?
One question of interest is how far repeated shots with the exact same rifle aim are going to land from each other. That would depend on changing wind directions and other atmospheric effects. Presumably you pick a day of near zero winds for such attempts.
Agreed, the scope is really just a rough aid in an application like this. How do you even know how to adjust the scope for that range in the first place? You’d zero in on the target by adjusting group to group, or in this case probably shot to shot.
The design of the bullet itself is interesting. Normally, longer and thinner is more aerodynamic, in any fluid, air or water - it creates less turbulence and drag. But here they found shorter and fatter works better for transonic projectiles:
> The .416 Barrett cartridge is made by “necking down” a .50 Browning Machine Gun (BMG) round to accommodate the roughly .40-caliber bullet. It’s a relatively short, stout bullet that proved ideal for its purpose, Humphries said.
> “Traditionally in extreme long-range shooting, we wanted long, skinny bullets,” he said. “However, we discovered that as a bullet crosses over into subsonic velocity, it flies better if it’s shorter and fatter.”
Bullets in flight have a few dynamical modes where they have a sort of wobble around the direction of travel. They all, when given enough distance, end up tumbling end over end which absolutely ruins accuracy though getting hit with a tumbling bullet is quite destructive for soft targets.
I can totally see trying for a record being helped with a low aspect ratio bullet (er, short and stubby) though this is probably not what you’d actually do if you were doing anything but trying for records.
Fun fact: if you don’t correct for the fact that the earth is spinning which requires knowing your latitude and compass direction, your targeting will be off by an amount measured in feet at this range.
I spent a while developing external ballistics models for a similar use case years ago.
The standard tome of knowledge is McCoy - Modern Exterior Ballistics https://a.co/d/8B6w0qL
Would you happen to know why so many high speed videos of bullets show them flying pitched up or down slightly from the direction of flight shortly after leaving the muzzle?
You know how a train has angled wheels on each side so any perturbation will naturally cause the wheels to turn back towards the center? It's kind of like that. A perturbation away from the center causes a force to return towards the center but it's not damped all the way so there's a persistent wave motion back and forth at a characteristic frequency.
A bullet is like that but has more degrees of freedom so there are a few of these kinematic modes happening at the same time.
I don’t know why but that just gave me a whole new perspective on what’s happening in flight. I had been thinking of the visually perceptible motion but that made me think of the forces at play while it’s basically in freefall spinning in a slippery pocket of air.
Everything happens so fast it’s easy to forget that physics is still happening one molecule at a time.
> “When a bullet is in flight for that long, you have to take into account the rotational speed of the earth. What you’re shooting at isn’t going to be in the same place it was 24 second ago when you pulled the trigger.”
Wow. Impressive work! I also noted the pitch differential between scope and barrel :O
Impressive, indeed [1], but its the easiest of the corrections they had to do. Its a standard classical physics question and has been included in artillery calculations since at least the late 19th century.
[1] Id imagine that a bullet, being so light compared to a shell, is more affected by fluid flow than the coreolis force. That the correction was needed means they nailed the far more difficult fluid problem.
Coriolis deflection is a rounding error compared other sources of inaccuracy. In their press release[1] they said they didn't account for it:
> Scott made the wind and elevation call of 1,092 MOA up and 17 MOA left. (In our original release, I forgot to include that we added a 36 MOA left mechanical wind adjustment at the beginning of the day for a total of 53 MOA for the hit. Our calculation for spindrift was 93.80” right) We did not take into account the Coriolis, as much of that is lost in the weeds with respect to wind (6-9 mph), temperature rising (constantly adjusting elevation) and time of flight. The bullet’s flight path is over 2500 feet above line-of-sight and there is a lot going on up there that we are unable to predictably compensate for. If it had been an absolutely dead-calm day it definitely would be one more variable to try to address.
MOA stands for minute of angle, which is 1/60th of a degree, so a 1,092 MOA adjustment is 18.2 degrees. It's insane that they managed to hit the target.
It's essentially a little bit similar to a mortar shell launch I suppose, at that distance? Reminds me of the fun I had trying to do ultra long distance shots playing Gunbound (South Korean MMMORPG that was similar to Worms) online. Very impressive.
Military snipers in training will practice at a mile+ and take the Coriolis Effect into account (or at least be trained to). Though they'll tell you the likelihood of getting one-shot one-kill is pretty low once you go past a mile of range.
This reminds me about the Ukrainian Snipex Alligator sniper rifle I read about recently. It uses 14.5-millimeter heavy machine gun rounds and it's claimed to be able to penetrate 10mm steel armor at 1,500 meters.
It's super easy to buy a gun online. The part that is not easy is getting around the step where it has to be shipped to someone or something (company) that has a federal firearms license, which then is supposed to perform the background check on you before handing over the weapon you paid for. But there's myriad websites that will happily take your credit card info and ship anything that's not NFA class 3 to the FFL of your choice.
What’s your interpretation of easy? These types of firearms aren’t cheap. For example, a Barrett .50 BMG M82A1 is like $12,000. No website is going to ship it directly to you either. It has to go through an FFL which will perform a background check.
(f) For the purposes of the National Firearms Act, the term “Destructive Device” means:
(2) Any type of weapon by whatever name known which will, or which may readily be converted to expel a projectile, by the action of an explosive or other propellant, the barrel or barrels of which have a bore greater than one-half inch in diameter.
This is bad news for those Nerf guns that shoot large balls of plastic foam with lightly compressed air. (Or is compressed air excluded from "other propellant"?)
>The term “destructive device” shall not include any device which is neither designed nor redesigned for use as a weapon; any device, although originally designed for use as a weapon, which is redesigned for use as a signaling, pyrotechnic, line throwing, safety, or similar device; surplus ordnance sold, loaned, or given by the Secretary of the Army pursuant to the provisions of section 7684(2), 7685, or 7686 of title 10, United States Code; or any other device which the Secretary finds is not likely to be used as a weapon, or is an antique or is a rifle which the owner intends to use solely for sporting purposes.
Which is how >0.50" black powder rifles, air guns and flare guns still exist.
there was an issue with the desert eagle as a 50 cal weapon, at time considered a DD, so there was a revision for civilian carry that was, 49.5 cal with a tapered chamber. if bored out to a true 50 cal, it would constitute production of a DD
It’s not that big of a deal really. A guy in the high power rocketry hobby club I’m in has a 20mm cannon. It’s a single shot anti tank rifle basically. It’s pretty much impossible to use it in a crime because of how gigantic and heavy it is.
Such rifles are huge, heavy, expensive, and difficult to transport. I can't find a single instance of a .50 BMG rifle being used to murder someone in the US. Anti-gun groups like Violence Policy Center have one report of a .50 caliber rifle being used in a homicide[1], but Adam Wickizer was a convicted felon and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.[2] That double-disqualifies him from possessing firearms. He most likely used a .50 caliber muzzle-loader black powder rifle, which is far less powerful and does not require a background check to acquire.
If you want to restrict things based on how often they're used in crimes, you probably want to go after handguns. Around half of murders are committed with handguns.[3] Rifles of any kind are used in ~3% of homicides. For comparison, twice as many people are murdered with bare hands than with rifles. And despite civilians owning .50 BMGs for over a century, nobody can find an instance of someone in the US being murdered with one. In short, the data does not support restricting these things.
I don't know if that's supposed to be comforting, but "Don't worry -- this weapon is way too large and powerful for someone to use in mere petty crime!" does not exactly put one at ease
It's trivially easy to make an air gun capable of killing someone with parts from a hardware store and a bicycle tire pump. $20 in parts, give or take, plus the cost of the pump.
Beyond that, manufacturing explosives is also easy with chemicals from a hardware store. Manufacturing stable explosives is a bit trickier, though not by much- it just limits the explosives you can make.
Really big weapons are harder to use in petty crime, because they're really, really obvious when you carry them around, and petty crime isn't worth whipping the big guns out for- the bullet is probably worth more than what you could get off of most people walking the street.
For example .50 BMG rounds are $3-6 per round. Live 20mm rounds require a $200 tax stamp per round and I couldn't even find a place where you could buy live ones.
A potato gun with hair spray as a propellant can for sure kill a man. My friends in high school would make them, and blast a large potato 2-4 football fields.
be careful with these if you get too extravagant. the only thing keeping this from being considered destructive device is that its a smoothbore muzzle loader.
if you were to put a bolt action and or a potato hopper on it or rifle the bore it would be a DD , stay on compresed air if you want to mod up. other than that, smooth bore shove a spud in the end and light up with butane and its a legal device
Hehe, I did professional CAD for a year before college so that whole thing is custom drawn in AutoCAD. As in I hand measured and drew each part because I didn't have some library of parts. It was part of my senior computer science/writing (lol) project 18 years ago. It's sitting in my dad's garage 2,500 miles away. A writeup without some action video would be kind of boring and I don't have the tools or space to build another in my broom closet of an apartment...
You're welcome to build one yourself with the spec and do it. The only things not shown are:
1. An ordinary Schrader (bike tire) on the tank. Drill through the triple walled part somewhere, tap, Teflon tape and twist it in.
2. A 0.25" NPT ~125(?) PSI pop off valve also in the triple walled part (somewhere) and maybe a pressure (I think? The bike pump's gauge should be fine as long as you don't fill it with really cold air and then leave it in the sun). Technically optional, but if you explode yourself it's on you.
2. The battery box to activate the sprinkler valve, but that's just a couple of 9v batteries in series in a project box with a big red button. I never even bothered mounting it to the gun so it just kind of...dangled from the gun by its wires.
3. A wooden block cut to fit between the barrel and tank with a semi-permanent metal strap around it to hold it together. Very solid with this, very janky without it.
Both ends of the sprinkler valve are just sealed with teflon tape and twisted together so You can take it apart for transport.
To assemble the nested barrel I left the 1.5" SDR 21 outside during winter and filled the 2" SCH 80 PVC in the shower with hot water (sat it on the drain plug), then slid the little one into the big one. The 1.5" SDR 21 was hand picked (mic'ed) to closely fit in the outer barrel by the guy I bought it from. You might not even need the outer barrel, but 1.5" SDR is really thin, so the chonky outer barrel protects it.
I played with it up to ~105 PSI, but it could probably handle a lot more without the pop off installed. The U-bend hampers the hell out of the flow, I'm sure, but a 10' long gun would have been very awkward to move around and be hell on the all the component joints. As is, you can hold it like a big minigun and shoot it. Though the cyclic rate is about 1 round per 5 minutes depending on how tired you are on the bike pump. Recoil is negligible. It'll punch a golf ball through 1" of chipboard, who knows what else. Maybe a person.
After the initial discharge the sprinkler valve flap makes a hilarious hooting noise.
Maybe I'll see if the Backyard scientist wants to recreate it? It seems right up his alley.
I did something very similar, but used a butterfly valve rather than a sprinkler release. It meant needing to stand next to it and manually release, but it was a lot cheaper.
I also used 3/4" piping, which worked really well for lots of smaller projectiles, and meant that a female threaded adapter and some epoxy let me use 20oz or 2 liter bottles as tanks. I only got them to 80 psi, but I suspect they would have held just fine at 100.
Soft projectiles would disintegrate in the air (no paintballing) but hard things- gobstoppers, batteries, frozen grapes- could cause a lot of fun destruction.
Everyone thinks james bond when the reality is someone hits you over the head with a rock they found. Like that xkcd where they beat you with a wrench for the password.
The licensing and nerdy nature of owning something like that makes it super safe. Nobody is risking their hobby and investment.
The issue with guns is the end times marketing flooding the zone with guns and the malevolent subcultures. If you want to use an awkward weapon, you can juice up a potato cannon with pvc pipe or something.
The people who can afford to buy and maintain that sort of thing aren't going throw their life away with it in a petty crime. Almost all gun violence is gang related and committed with handguns.
> Almost all gun violence is international warfare.
Unlikely. Less than 100K die in war annually, but that isn't only from gun violence. Most gun-related deaths in the US are not from petty crime or gangs. In 2020, 45,222 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S., according to the CDC. And more have been killed by a gun in the US since 1968 than in all US wars combined.[1] It would be more accurate (yet still inaccurate) to say most gun violence occurs in the US.[2] 67% of gun owners report defense as the reason for gun ownership, yet there is no evidence that guns are protective, and those living in a home with a gun have a greater chance of being killed by a gun than otherwise.[3]
A lot of the talking points you're repeating here are intentionally misleading, although I recognize that you may not intend to mislead — you may merely have been misled yourself. If that is the case, you should probably re-evaluate your criteria for judging the credibility of information sources. As you will see, although it seems unlikely to you that almost all gun violence is international warfare, it is in fact true.
I know it can be difficult to read a "wall of text" like this, but accurately conveying the reality of a nuanced situation cannot be done with perky infographics and bullet points, particularly when it is necessary to carefully dissect the half-truths propagated by dishonest parties. I estimate that reading this will take you about four minutes; it's 1632 words. I hope you have the attention span.
As you may not know, most of those 45'222 "gun-related injury" deaths are suicides; as the BBC article you linked explains, only 19'384 were actually gun violence, up from under 15'000 the year before. (The US had 20'982 homicides overall in 2020, but some were not by gun.) Typically suicides by gun are about twice as common as homicides by gun in the US, but apparently 2020 was an exceptionally violent year there.
Unsurprisingly, suicides by gun are enormously more common among people who live in a home with a gun, which accounts for most of the positive correlation between gun death and gun ownership.
Moreover, there is strong evidence that access to a gun increases people's risk of suicide — it's not merely that people blow their heads off because it's easier than hanging yourself or overdosing on drugs, they actually killed themselves when they would have stayed alive if they hadn't had a gun. This effect is, at best, very weak with homicides, to the point that we don't know whether either population gun prevalence or gun ownership is a weak risk factor or a weak protective factor for homicide.
70 million people died in World War II, which is 3500 years' worth of those 19'384 people per year. If we divide those 70 million over the last century, World War II alone accounts for 700'000 deaths per year, seven times the number you cite of 100'000 per year.
5.4 million people died in the Second Congo War (1998–2008), 270 years' worth of those 19'384 people per exceptionally violent year, but to be fair most of them were held at gunpoint in refugee camps where they died of disease or starved to death, rather than being directly shot; only 350'000 were actually direct violent deaths, which is only a bit more than twice as many as were killed in the US during the same period. (But Congo's population is one third as big.) You will note that 5.4 million people killed over 11 years is 490'000 deaths per year, several times the 100'000 wartime deaths per year you cite, and that's just one war of several that were going on at the time, though it was the biggest one.
The US Civil War involved something like 700'000 deaths, which is about 30–40 years of 2020-level US peacetime gun violence, though, again, out of a much smaller population.
You've inaccurately paraphrased Chelsea Bailey's claim in the NBC article (https://archive.fo/TlCkV); she's talking only about the 1.2 million members of the US armed forces killed in US wars, entirely omitting the people who lived in the countries the US was invading. She even omitted the American civilians killed in the US Civil War! The Vietnam War alone, for example, killed at least 1.3 million people, probably closer to 3 million. The 2020 US's 19'384 gun murders per year would take 150 years to reach that number. Bailey counts the Vietnam War as 0.09 million; she didn't even deign to count Vietnamese and Laotian people as the Constitutional three-fifths of a person. Of course, she also included about a million gun suicides in her 1.53 million gun deaths in the US since 1968. For some reason, the source she cited for this number (a number I think is roughly correct, if misleading when presented as an indicator of gun violence) was an MMWR article from 1994 which documents about 700'000 gun deaths, including suicides, since 1968. Evidently her intended audience isn't the kind of person who checks citations.
It should be unsurprising that when one country invades another, the country that gets invaded suffers the bulk of the deaths. On this count, the US is exceptional, both in not having been invaded since 1865 or arguably 1815, and in invading other countries at a truly unprecedented rate, one that is as far as I know unexcelled even by the Soviet Union, the British Empire, and Genghis Khan. This is known to be an important factor in its relatively high peacetime murder rate.
It is indeed very inaccurate to say that most gun violence occurs in the US, even excluding international warfare; countries with higher homicide counts include Mexico, India, Brazil, and Nigeria, and almost all homicides in Mexico, Brazil, and Nigeria are with guns, just like the US. (India has a much lower murder rate than the US, but because its population is five times as large, it has about twice as many murders, though very few are with guns.)
I'm not sure why comparison articles like the BBC article omit Mexico, Brazil, and Nigeria; it's possible that, like Chelsea Bailey at NBC, they don't consider human deaths important if the people who die aren't white, though Bailey went even further by implicitly dehumanizing US civilian and white European victims of warfare as well. Alternatively, instead of attempting to portray the reality of the world accurately, as I am doing here, they are cherry-picking data points in order to justify a preconceived conclusion.
I don't have current worldwide death statistics handy, unfortunately, but the WHO's burden-of-disease report from 2004 says that in 2002, within the category of "intentional injuries", 557'900 people died of "violence" (i.e., murder), 872'662 of "self-inflicted injuries" (suicide), and 171'021 of "war", which is 1.7 times the 100'000 per year figure you cite for wartime deaths. The US had 15'700 homicides that year, according to that report, 2.8% of world homicides. You will note that this means that 97.2% of homicides, and a somewhat lower fraction of gun homicides, were outside the US. So saying that most gun violence occurs in the US is very inaccurate indeed.
Some subset of those 557'900 were killed with guns in peacetime; it would take 125 years of that death rate, even if it were all guns, to equal the 70 million killed in only World War II, out of, again, a much smaller world population. But of course in the 77 years since World War II there have been many other wars, some of which I've mentioned above. 2002 just happened to be a year without much war.
In conclusion, almost all gun violence is international warfare. Statistically the picture is very clear; though the intensity of warfare varies by orders of magnitude from one year to the next, the average number of war deaths is about an order of magnitude higher than the average number of peacetime gun murders. (Also, as you said, most peacetime gun murders are by family members or intimate partners, not robbers or gangs.)
There do remain three possible quibbles.
First, possibly we should count the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Holocaust, the Cambodian Killing Fields, and so on, as "gun violence", and they were not for the most part international warfare. Most of the people killed in the Great Leap Forward were starved to death rather than being shot, and most of the people killed in the Holocaust were gassed, but in both cases gun violence was the foundation of the mass murder system, just as with the Second Congolese Civil War. These deaths (Rummel coined the term "democides" as a generalization of "genocides") account for a surprisingly large fraction of 20th-century violent deaths, comparable in fact to warfare. The US prison system does not rise to the level of these atrocities, as its direct death toll is actually fairly low, but you could argue in the same way that the millions of people every year in the US who are arrested by police with guns and then held in prisons with gun-armed guards are also being subjected to gun violence, even if it doesn't kill them.
Second, possibly World War II was some sort of freak accident that will never be repeated, and the ensuing 60 years of Pax Americana are really more typical of what to expect from now on. Given that Vladimir Putin threatened to start a second nuclear war this week, I am skeptical of that thesis, but it might turn out to be correct. Even in that case, though, peacetime gun homicide has a smaller death toll than warfare; it just stops being an insignificantly small fraction of the total.
Third, as you say, maybe when a missile blows up a hospital and kills half the people inside, or a bomber covers a screaming family with napalm, we shouldn't count that as "gun deaths" because no actual guns are involved, so maybe we should derate the war deaths by some fraction to account for that. We don't really know what fraction of war deaths are from gunshots, especially in cases like Congo with many irregulars and deliberately inaccurate official casualty reports, but even in cases like Vietnam, where there's over a factor of 2 uncertainty in the total death toll. But it seems implausible that gun deaths in war are an order of magnitude less than total deaths in war, so this is not a big enough effect for peacetime gun murders to exceed wartime gun violence.
> A lot of the talking points you're repeating here are intentionally misleading
False. I listed a few facts that are easily verified.
> As you may not know, most of those 45'222 "gun-related injury" deaths are suicides
False. Roughly half are suicides, and not "most." Suicide by gun is a violent death. Your entire diatribe regarding suicide is a straw man.
> 70 million people died in World War II...
I paraphrased, and the title of the article is slightly ambiguous, leaving a tiny pinhole which you are trying to squeeze a straw man of epic proportions through. To be perfectly clear, more Americans have been killed by guns since 1968 than the number of Americans killed in all US wars combined. In this statistic the number of Japanese, North Koreans or Vietnamese, etc., killed are not counted. It is only comparing the number of Americans killed by guns since 1968 to the number of Americans killed in all wars. Yes it is terrible so many have died in war, but unfortunately your argument here is still a straw man and therefore fallicious.
> It is indeed very inaccurate to say that most gun violence occurs in the US,
As stipulated, but I was merely making the point that the statement is more accurate than:
>> Almost all gun violence is international warfare
which is entirely false, and not even 1000 pages of straw man arguments can change that.
In order for your argument to be valid, as mine is, you must focus on what is said, as is, and avoid introducing new information only to attack it.
I understand some people really like guns, but no matter how much they like guns, it doesn't change the simple fact that the more guns there are, the more gun deaths there will be. This is a formula proven over and over, year after year.
It also doesn't change the fact that the Founders had no intention of arming the citizenry, and that our beloved 2nd Amendment is only referring to militias, and we know this beyond doubt from the minutes of the Constitutional Congresses, even though most gun owners can't seem to read the first 3 words of the Amendment. The salient point is not about regulation, it is about militias during a period of history that was so different from today that the 2nd Amendment no longer rationally applies, and people are dying because fanatics, those not exactly mentally stable, insist on owning guns, and not just one or two, but an entire arsenal. One of the statistics in that BBC article is missing something, which is the statistic that for every 100 US citizens there are 120 firearms. But only 1/3rd of Americans are gun owners, so a lot of them have more guns than they can carry or operate, which underscores their fanaticism and irrationality.
No one wants to repeal the 2nd Amendment, not even liberals, because "liberal" literally means tolerant, as in tolerant of those with insane ideas about gun ownership. Though it wouldn't be a bad idea to strike down those portions of DC v. Keller (2008) that overreach beyond the mandate of the Supreme Court to gut the 2nd Amendment, changing it from a selfless right to protect against tyranny to a redundant and selfish right to protect self or property. The Founders debated self-defense and intentionally left it out of the Amendment, because a right of self-defense is much older and more fundamental than the Bill of Rights. And Scalia was completely mistaken: most Americans are not confused about that, nor is there any significant agenda to include self-defense in the 2nd. If that agenda exists, it is of a vanishingly tiny percentage. DC v Heller weakens the 2nd immensely, and is part of a larger trend of dismantling the US Constitution piece by piece, after the suspension of habeas corpus and the continuing assaults on the 1st, 4th, 5th and 6th Amendments, and most recently, Article II. I wish the Right would just leave the US Constitution alone and be patriots instead of anarchists.
I am deeply disappointed in the quality of your response.
The issue being disputed is whether, as I said, almost all gun violence is international warfare, or not. I clearly showed that your figure for deaths from international warfare is low by at least an order of magnitude. Your lengthy diatribe about the US is almost entirely irrelevant; whether you are right or wrong about the motivations of 18th-century politicians, your countrymen's eccentric hobbies, or trends in your country's jurisprudence, those have no bearing whatsoever on the death tolls of the Congolese Civil War, Operation Barbarossa, or Nigerian bandit gangs.
The US has very little special relevance to this question, since, as I said, some 95% of deaths and 97% of killings happen elsewhere; there are only a few exceptions:
1. They manufacture a significant fraction of the weapons people everywhere use to kill each other.
2. They have started a significant fraction of the wars in the world over the last century or so by invading other countries.
3. They have unusually transparent and reliable health statistics, from which we can to some extent draw conclusions about the rest of the world.
It is entirely unclear what kind of "straw man" you think I am making of your arguments. You said:
- Less than 100K [people] die in war annually: this is dramatically false, as I showed.
- Some people who die in war don't die from gun violence: I agreed with this, but I don't think the fraction is small enough to change the picture much.
- Most gun-related deaths in the US are not from petty crime or gangs: here you were agreeing with my point that petty crime and gangs are a rounding error.
- Statistics about US "gun-related injuries": I explained why this is misleading (cherry-picked year, cherry-picked country, conflation of suicide with violent deaths) and put it in the wider context.
- "more have been killed by a gun in the US since 1968 than in all US wars combined": presumably this meant more people, not more hamsters, more bottles of wine, or more Americans, since the subject at hand was how many people die, not how many hamsters or Americans die. This is completely false; as I showed, the relationship is the other way around, and it's not even close.
- "It would be more accurate (yet still inaccurate) to say most gun violence occurs in the US": I explained why this statement is actually less accurate.
- "67% of gun owners report defense as the reason for gun ownership, yet there is no evidence that guns are protective, and those living in a home with a gun have a greater chance of being killed by a gun than otherwise": this juxtaposition is calculated to produce the false impression that those living in a home with a gun have a greater chance of being killed with a gun by someone else than otherwise. In fact, as I explained, in the US, they have a greater chance of killing themselves with a gun, and almost exactly the same chance, on average, of being killed with a gun by someone else. (The direction of the association depends on exactly how you try to control for confounding factors like being poor or living in a dangerous neighborhood.)
So, of your seven "facts that are easily verified", two are correct (and I explicitly affirmed them), three are completely false, and the other two are misleading half-truths.
As for whether suicide by gun is "a violent death", well, yes, there is a sense of the word "violent" in which almost anything you do with a gun is "violent": if you shoot a target, a violent explosion in the gun propels the bullet into a violent impact with the target, at which point usually either the bullet or the target violently shatters.
However, as you are presumably aware, this is not the sense of the word "violent" being used in the phrase "gun violence". When concerned parents complain about "TV violence" they are not complaining about filmed 4th-of-July fireworks shows or after-school specials about suicide; they are complaining about people being depicted as intentionally harming others. Shelters for "domestic violence" victims are not for people whose house was destroyed by a hurricane or who have overdosed on pills at home; they are for people who need to escape from someone else in their home who is intentionally harming them. An old woman, living alone, found in her bathtub after slitting her wrists is not called "domestic violence". Similarly for "sexual violence", "youth violence", "collective violence", "political violence", and so on. So, when we talk about "gun violence", we are talking about people using guns to intentionally harm others, not for target practice, and not for shooting themselves.
This is important because suicide is different from homicide in almost every way that matters: it has different effects, it has different causes, it affects different people, and in general different measures are effective in reducing it. Almost all they have in common from a public-health perspective is that they do not disproportionately affect old people in the way most causes of death do. Conflating them is not helpful for reasoning.
Please, if you reply again, try to write a higher-quality comment next time, and don't insult my intelligence by substituting puns for reasoning in this way. Also, it would be nice to read less irrelevant tangents about your local partisan politics.
tl;dr guards at prison camps had guns, therefore any prisoner who died of disease/malnutrition/gassing was ackshually a gun death. Give me the internet points for the giant rambling wall of pointless text.
It should come as no surprise that this summary is the opposite of what I said: I didn't count those deaths as gun violence, even though arguably I should have, and my conclusion depends on not counting them. If you count them as "gun violence" you will instead come to the conclusion that most deaths from "gun violence" are inflicted in peacetime by governments on their subjects, which is the opposite of my main thesis.
this class of device is considered NFA or AnyOtherWeapon [AOW] if it isnt a sporting rifle or pistol.
greater than 50 cal/12.5 mm is a Destructive Device.
this means a background check similar to a shortbarrel rifle, or fully automatic firearm is required as well as a taxation stamp for purchase and posession.
You can buy _several_ things that are far easier to do intentional crimes with, and cheaper.
The real thing you'd probably have to worry about would be accidents, which assuming a not-complete-moron are probably also much much less likely just because the thing would be expensive and annoying to shoot.
You might have trouble reaching them these days since they are based out of Kharkiv and make everything in house. But you can give them a call if you want one. You might have problems taking it out of Ukraine to your home country though.
If you have nine grand available on a visa card you can buy a Barrett m82a1 online right now, ship to local FFL, fill out a form, pick it up in a week or two.
> “The bullet is coming down so slowly, and at about a 48-degree angle, it was just penetrating into the ground without kicking up dust.”
I have no shooting experience, but the arc they have to put into the shot to travel 4.4 miles (~7 km), seems so counter-intuitive to what I associate with shooting. Really impressive work by this team, to have all this calculated out so that they can hit it within 69 shots.
I'm really curious what the success rate of their shot is. From the video, it sounds like the unsuccessful shots were still relatively close by, enough that they seemed confident in being able to still guide it in, so around 1/100 sounds about right, as a crude prior estimate.
Over water (completely flat) you have a maximum sight-line of 3.1 miles due to the curve of the earth. Not only is this shot unlikely to be repeatable, but it is downright impossible without a forward observer.
The current record for the farthest sniper shot resulting in a kill is just under 2.2 miles for reference. With the power requirements to get a bullet out that far, all of the longest sniper shots are using effectively anti-material rifles (designed to take out a car engine, not a person).
“It’s a one-in-a-million shot. They said it’s not statistically repeatable,” he said. “The amount of precision and time that went into that shot was simply amazing.
104 years ago the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Gun could shoot 120 km (75 "miles", in medieval units), but it definitely couldn't hit a 200-mm target. Not even in 69 tries. (Yes, it was rifled.)
To me it seems like a more sensible way to hit a target from 7 km away would be to guide the projectile with movable canards, like the VAPP (or, as mentioned elsethread, the M982 Excalibur or XM1156 PGK). You could even do this with a bow and "arrow": once the "arrow" has gained 300 meters of altitude, it has a range of 7 km if its glide ratio is 24, quite achievable (though a regular arrow has a glide ratio of about 0). And you don't have to shoot it straight up, so you can get by with an even lower glide ratio than that.
It seems there is a regular cross-section between technology interests and firearms interest. In most groups of the first type I find there is small group of the second, perhaps owing to the interesting problems to be solved in long range shooting.
I have lots of guns of every sort, but I collect old Marlins. I especially like the ones from the 50s in particular. They were never perfect, but the difference in factory quality from the old days vs modern stuff (especially the 70s and afterward) is amazing.
Right on. I still haven’t tried a Marlin. My first lever action was an Ithaca 49R which is from that era and is a great piece of history. Completely agree on the difference in factory quality.
Not to detract from the calculations and physical adjustments required to even get close, but a single bullseye at any other range doesn't impress. It's the grouping, three or more on top of each other.
To maybe detract, this was the 69th consecutive attempt. Hmm.
We used to break distance records in video games. The shooter would fire a shot and the spotters moved the target to where the shot landed then the shooter would fire again. Managed to get some amazing distances that way and break the game.
Not trying to downplay this. But with 69 shots, isn't this like Worms computer games where your first shot is guesstimate, and the rest is just nudging the degree "up or down"?
Or they use same approach that NASA uses to launch a rocket to ensure it lands on the moon? I.e some sophisticated calculation (which I assume part of the “some secrets” mentioned in the article).
"“It’s a one-in-a-million shot. They said it’s not statistically repeatable,” he said."
So it's like they're admitting it's almost a fluke, and I appreciate how they're being so upfront about that. They made a follow up video about how it's more like YouTube basketball world records than competition level ones. But still a great achievement.
I would love to see super slow-motion video of the bullet at the end of its flight to see how it’s spinning. It must be significantly slower than when it exits the barrel. Cue slow-mo guys.
Another very interesting thing to see up close and slow-mo would be the transition from supersonic to subsonic, but I have no idea how you’d even begin to get a camera set up to capture that.
I wrote a story where one scene had a rifle shot from just under a mile away. I don't shoot, and did what research I could under the deadline - characters heard the sound of the impact, and then the sound of the actual report shortly afterward. But I wonder if when it's that far away, if the report wouldn't have been audible at all.
They mention in the article that by the end of it's flight, the bullet is flying subsonically and that their bullet is optimized for that subsonic flight so I wonder if that forms a significant portion of the flight time. If so you could have the sonic boom start to catch back up with the bullet and not get as much delay as at a closer range.
Naval shells have much lower surface to mass ratios. In the limit that that ratio goes to zero the fluid forces disappear and you're left with simple parabolic motion + rotation of the Earth.
You’re grossly oversimplifying. Naval firing calculations include factors like the temperature of both the air and the barrel and minor variations in powder quality - and then of course both the thing you’re trying to hit AND the gun itself are both moving in 3 dimensions.
Even WWII mechanical fire computers took 30-40 variables as input
Looks like +/- 2 inch accuracy which is well beyond naval guns at 20 miles.
Custom guided artillery shells could probably hit that kind of accuracy at significantly longer ranges, but pure ballistic weapons simply aren’t designed for extreme accuracy at range.
It was 99% team effort and luck. "...it was nothing short of miraculous for the shot, the 69th attempt that morning, to land inside an 8-inch orange bullseye..."
Should you put the target due East or West to remove this effect? Or is it dominated by other concerns that would make you want a different direction (I don't know what - prevailing winds, having to find a 7km patch of empty space - neither sound so difficult in Wyoming).
Windy Wyoming as it's called. I live in the east side of the state - few hours away from where they did this.
While Pinedale is generally less windy, don't kid yourself, it changes constantly. Add in they did this test at like 8,000 ft elevation. The temperature is constantly changing.
I find it impressive they found a 4.4 mile stretch that was unobstructed, no risk to hitting something (person/critter) in that area. They found a ridge that allowed them a way to somewhat see the target.
No real world application for what they did, but the effort, the science, the planning - impressive.
I'm guessing they must have used GPS to find their location, and calculate the rotation of the earth. But even small changes - like repointing 1mm to the north or south would be huge over that distance.
Think about a CD or an LP spinning; the outside is going a lot faster (it’s covering a lot more distance in the same amount of time) than the inside yet the RPM for both is the same. The earth is the same :)
It says it took them 69 attempts to hit the target. I wonder if that is repeatable, or did they just get lucky? The video gives the impression that the rifle was handheld, so they couldn't have dialed in shot like artillery. But if they had, what would the spread be like at that range? Would it even be possible to reliably hit the target? If not, is it literally just dumb luck?
I'm not saying it isn't impressive, but on the other hand... if you fire enough shots at something, you're eventually going to hit it. Where do you draw the line?
Think about it though, yeah they fired 69 shots. It took several minutes to setup each shot.
I can't hit a target at 50 yards. Its tough to get the mind clear and the heart rate down, breathing under control, and then try to figure out if the siting is off or you are off. Hell, siting in a firearm is a challenge. Changes in ammo have effects. The environment is always changing.
Anything at this range probably won't have any real world use cases. Nobody is going to try to shoot a deer at 4.4 miles. The military isn't going to use it in war.
What you will see is a ton of data being shared. Someone else will set a record in the future. And we will get to see that data. It really is interesting.
But I doubt you could take all the ammo in the world and randomly hit that target at that distance without a hell of alot of thought and planning.
I used to think the movie “Wanted” was pure science fiction. Not anymore. It’s feasible someone could be sniped out from miles away. Must be a nightmare for security logistics of VIPs.
Hah. I don't think its feasible for someone to be sniped at that distance. After 69 shots over hours on a good day, security would have well figured out they were under attack. If they didn't, the target probably would have been done with whatever they were doing and long gone.
Not that I want to condone violence or assassination, but on reading this my first thoughts were "wow, that would make certain things possible that are currently difficult-to-impossible". And also "Day of the Jackal".
69 tries required to finally have the shooter put the bullet where the calculator said it should be.
Just mount the damn thing on a robotised arm, give it an anemometer, a military laser rangefinder and a stabilised camera, it will hit shot after shot. That’s pretty much what a small calibre artillery gun is with a slightly higher calibre than their rifle because why bother with such an inefficient projectile anyway.
And to be fair, at this point, given the extensive modification to the rifle, what they are doing is more or less turning it into a poor piece of artillery before shooting it in the worst way possible.
Can't you say that of all pistol accuracy contests. Maybe even chess or poker these days? Namely a computer can do it better, and as you push the curve, more things are essentially 'automated' like memorizing position tables in chess that were computer generated.
The point is there's a spectrum of gamesmanship between completely 'human' and completely 'automatic', and I don't see why these sportsmen's choice along that curve is inherently bad.
I don’t think so. Accuracy records are generally done in fixed condition well into the range of the gun. What’s impressive is that the human is extremely consistent and can continuously hit the target. That’s entirely about the shooter.
Here it’s just pushing the capacity of a rifle and shooting enough to finally get what you want. That’s not really competing. Why stop there and not push the capacity of the gun towards something appropriate?
I personally don’t get it. A more fitting comparaison would be motorsport where the performance of the vehicle matters more than the pilot and which I also find utterly pointless.
> it will hit shot after shot. That’s pretty much what a small calibre artillery gun is.
I actually think there’s a lot more “luck” than that. The weather over 4 miles is probably enough to cause errors on a regular basis. Might only make 1/5 shots
Agreed, the OP you're replying to is entirely dismissive of the achievement in of itself. Lot's of things can be perhaps "better" without a human involved so why do we do any of them? Nascar and F1 racing, why are humans driving? Clearly an AI driven car can outperform any human on the racetrack, I'm not sure why we bother.
I think exactly the same thing of motorsport as I explained in another reply. These records are entirely based on technical advance in the equipment. The human factor is incidental.
It’s even worst here because the limits set on the record are purely arbitrary. Why is a souped rifle, civilian optics cobbled together and a calculator significant when you could just use a higher calibre and a better designed gun?
The whole thing is completely artificial therefor pointless to me. I mean there is reason they are beating their own previously held record by 46%. No one cares so no one is trying to beat them.
Think about it this way. They didn't have temperature sensors and wind gauges setup every 20 ft along the path to the target.
Someone said, "How can I do this." It's not that much different than saying "I'll jog around the block." Couple weeks later "I'll jog around the block in half the time when I started." Weeks later "I'll jog around the neighborhood."
It is a hobby. It is complex. Someone made it happen.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2019/07/30/tacomhq-struc...
https://tacomhq.com/structured-barrels/
The Engineering Behind a TACOMHQ Structured Barrel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-7LKQYtU48