Posted on 05/22/2017 5:41:30 AM PDT by rktman
“Either way, I don’t know how you hit a moving target in the throat at that range, whether it’s a 59’ drop or 144’.”
Saw some video of snipers. They would aim for a ‘spot’ where they would expect the target would be. Markings on the scope were used to correlate distance/time.
When the ‘target’ reached a certain mark on the scope, the sniper would fire.
; )
It’s an impressive shot. I could perhaps aim three seconds of movement ahead of the target, all other things being perfect. As for aiming a full degree high (1.042 degrees) and reading that angle to an accuracy of 0.01 degrees, that’s not going to be happening.
Actually it was engineering. But you did nail my minor. You must have been a psych major.
My problem was that the slide rule that I had permanently connected to my left hand has gone missing that little sliding window thingy and I find myself prone to errors when making even the simplist calculations.
And my alternative, Siri, speaks to me in Spanish exclusively and never seems to get anything right.
But I promise to be more careful in the future.
Looking at specs of a military grade commercial scope it has a 100 moa elevation adjustable at 1/4 moa increments.
Or just plug the numbers into your ballistic computer, or use the equivalent app on your smartphone. A 2000-meter Newcon rangefinder is a pretty handy thing to have along as well.
Range 3 at Camp Atterbury in Indiana will be among the base range facilities open in August for the National Long-Range service rifle championships in August. The range offers targets a mile distant, and black rifles made of aluminum and plastic have not yet come to dominate the activities there. I'll be giving it a try with a M98 Mauser in the original 7,92x57mm caliber, but using Hornady 196-gr boattail hollowpoints, the same weight as the old German WWI watercooled Maxim heavy machinegun load used for 2000-2500 meter arcing fire in the days of trench-to-trench shooting across no man's land.
I'm dropping a little over 50 inches at 500 meters, the longest range I have to work with on short notice. Which seems to work about right, as calculated by your formula.
Sergeant Tung Chih Yeh, using Type 24 Mauser rifles, both scoped and not, 1937-1941
Or a friendly artilleryman or mortar forward observer who can handle trig and plane geometry, or a tank with an optical rangefinder better than 6-8 feet between the lenses, good out to about 3000 meters.
In cities, distances can sometimes be reasonably accurately estimated from the height of still-standing multistory buildings, if there are any, and at least one enterprising highway patrol cop rifleman I know works by reading highway passing zone stripes. The distance between railway/road telephone/telegraph poles has been used the same way, but in these days of cell phones that's going away. The fence posts are still up, though.
And of course there's always the old Finnish trick of counting the paces as you fall back from a previously held position. You then find a good firing spot where you can nicely observe your old location, and wait first for the other people to occupy it, then for your delayed-action demolition charge to go off. Once the survivors come staggering out, an easy shot or two, maybe three, at the surprised and stunned survivors can be taken with minimal risk, and you can then fall back and repeat as needed. Or, if available, call in for artillery/mortar support once the medics begin working.
SAAMI won't accept a trademarked name for a caliber designation, the reason the .300 Whisper was slightly modified into the commercially successful and popular .30o Blackout, though the two cartridges are interchangeable.
Or, these days, note various landmarks on your GPS well ahead of time, so you can have your GPS calculate the precise distance.
I would imagine the military has a version of Google Maps available to the troops, where they can find the exact distance between a building, road, etc and their current position.
I forget the shooter's name, but in May 1940 one Dutch Army guardsman protecting a Rotterdam bridge against a possible invasion found himself hiding in the tulips as most of his pals surrendered after the German paratroops rode up to one end of the bridge in civilian clothing on bicycles, the other half making an on-the-spot precision landing and assault in pontoon-equipped Heinkel floatplanes. And then they set up guards on the bridge, after pulling the demolition charges, and a couple of largish tents and chairs and a table that practically screamed *staff officers- command post*. And so it was.
The rifleman, no sniper, just a good rifleman, figured his range at well over 400 meters, maybe 500 or better, and guessed his wind from watching the tulips blowing in the breeze. He noted one officer deferred to by the others accepting the surrender of a Dutch officer, and not wearing a hat, figured it was the German commander, and the shooter took his shot.
He was wrong, the hatless officer was one with an ankle twisted in the landing, but in the second it took for his 6,5mm bullet's flight, the lucky target stepped out of the way, clearing a path to Generalleutnant Kurt Student, the senior commander of all German airborne forces, who was hit in the head. Student fell, alive, but seriously wounded, and remained hospitalized until January 1941. The rifleman then shot a German guard at the other end of the bridge as a distraction, took off through the flowers, his his rifle and went home and changed into his civilian clothing, reasonably figuring that the Germans would not be happy about the matter.
On orders from German Luftwaffe Chief Herman Goering [Germany's airborne were an Air Force unit, not Army] German propagandists spread the word that the injury had been from a stray bullet fired by an SS man, and the shooter got away with it.
The first day of the German attack came on 10 May 1940, Student was hit on 14 May. Patience, wait for the shot....
Hey! It's Pokémon! GET HIM! Bang! bang! bangetty-bang! BANGBANGBANGBANG!
Outstanding!
Carry on.
5.56mm
Thanks for the post and good luck with your target practice.
And you have I’ve given me one more opportunity to apologize for my massive screwup:
A 58 foot drop in 3 seconds was incorrect. The formula is correct but the calculation went awry.
The real 3 second drop: 144 feet.
I always enjoy those stories. I also suspect that once the distance gets beyond 500-800 yards, you need serious talent, plus either luck or time to calculate, to get a hit.
Equipment helps. We routinely got 600-800 meter cold-bore hits on a target a little bigger than a 2-liter pop bottle sitting on a sawed-off waist-high utility pole when shooting firepower demonstrations for West Point cadets taking their Summer training at Fort Knox. The rifle involved was the 90mm M68 main gun of the M48A2C tank, firing a solid 3.5-inch diameter TPT training projectile. THe 10X gunner's telescope made it fairly easy, the gun and scope having been previously sighted in for that distance [most other targets were out between 800-1200 meters to prevent ricochet/spalling injuries to those observing] and with the help of an optical rangefinder that crossed the entire width of the turret between objective lenses. On a 6x6-foot square panel target, the size of the kill zone of a tank taken from the flank, first round hits out to 2500 meters were not uncommon, and second round hits were practically a given.
But tank gunnery is far from the longest ranged example of long-distance precision shooting. The bores of the 16-inch guns of the U.S.S. Iowa class battleships are rifled, and can obtain minute-of-angle accuracy at distances approaching 20 miles, the explosive or armor-piercing projectile weighing in at about the weight of an old Volkswagon Beetle. Rocket assisted projectiles with a range nearing 50 miles also exist, but though they're less accurate, they can be guided prior to impact by a very forward observer or an aircraft, presumably a drone.
Equipment makes a difference.
Rule of thumb for those in the field without a ballistic computer/calculator/slide rule: NOT 3 x 32 fps, squared- that 32 fps drop is not a constant, and only applies to the terminal velocity after the first second- the initial rate of fall having been zero.
[The speed rises as the square root of height, but in direct proportion to time.]
The speed after 3 seconds is 96 feet per second. The total distance is 144 feet. Speed is acceleration times time. Distance is average speed times time. With constant acceleration, the average speed is the final speed divided by two.
So for the three-second bullet flight, the drop of the projectile [unless it's a spheroid musket or cannon ball, in which case see Robins or Bouriee] will approximate the height of a 14-story building- which sounds about right, compared to this shorter range and shorter church-steeple height elevation.
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