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Posted: 1/21/2005 10:11:53 AM EDT
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Ok I was mulling over some things about sighting in and whatnot, and I got a little lost somewhere in my head about the fundamentals: When one speaks of bullet rise, as in "When the rifle is zero'd in at 300, the bullet will hit high at 100" or something like that, I'm unsure as to whether this is caused by the angle of the rifle bore with respect to gravity, or if some aerodynamic affect causes a real "rise" in the bullet leaving the bore. Or to put it in other words, here's the question I need to know the answers to is: Ignoring optics and sight alignment and all that jazz - in some ideal world, if the ground I was standing on (and the target is on) are completely level with respect to gravity, and the bore of my gun is perfectly parallel to the ground, will the flight path of the bullet, at any point in time after leaving the muzzle, actually be higher than the bore of the rifle itself? I'm assuming that the answer to this question is "No, the bullet starts out at the level of the bore and only drops further down as it goes onwards, it never rises in hieght", and that the "rise" people refer to is because in order to get the sights zero'd at 300, the bore of the gun is actually angled upwards by some small amount, which lobs the bullet in an arc, and therefore prior to reaching the apex of this arc, the bullet is in fact travelling "upwards" with respect to the height of the bore from the ground... Am I right? |
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You have it right. If the barrel was exactly parallel to the ground, the bullet would immediately begin to drop. If you took the same bullet in your hand, hold it at the same heigth as the barrel, and release it exactly at the same moment as you fire, both bullets will hit the ground at the same time. And, yes, the bullet path is dependant on the initial angle of the rifle's barrel, which, in respect to the line of sight of the scope, angled upward, so the bullet will hit the LOS at a given range. |
Yeah, from what I've read coriolis force isn't something you bother with on a rifle. Maybe if you shoot .50BMG to it's limit and you're really going for maximum accuracy... But mostly it's for the really big anti-tank/ship/aircraft/whatever rounds, not rifles. |
Yes. -Troy |
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