[HN Gopher] At 4.4 miles, Wyoming team sets new rifle shot world...
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At 4.4 miles, Wyoming team sets new rifle shot world record
Author : bkohlmann
Score : 394 points
Date : 2022-09-23 20:34 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (cowboystatedaily.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cowboystatedaily.com)
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| 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?
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Both, combined with quite a bit of luck.
|
| >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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| That's not true at all.
|
| 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.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| He's not hitting the target reliably, it took more than 60
| tries, and would take just as many to do again
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| What's supposed to be impressive about "I hit a bullseye
| by coincidence"?
| bell-cot wrote:
| 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.)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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?
| bell-cot wrote:
| 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...
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| 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?
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| 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.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| >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
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| 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?
| msherry wrote:
| That's why this is such an impressive achievement!
| hamburglar wrote:
| It's also why they succeeded on the 69th try instead of
| the 2nd.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| 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".
| [deleted]
| hamburglar wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Considering the guy who made the shot commented "we were
| amazed we got it in so few shots", taking all day is
| expected anyway.
| spiderice wrote:
| > non-deterministic kick
|
| Actually non-deterministic? Or just difficult-to-
| deterministic? Genuinely curious.
| verandaguy wrote:
| 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.
| kadoban wrote:
| 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.
| jakear wrote:
| So nondeterministic in the same way an electron passing
| through two slits is.
| cli wrote:
| 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.
| kadoban wrote:
| I think slightly less non-deterministic than that,
| because there's at least some way you could know, if you
| were god.
| kragen wrote:
| 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.
| adrianpike wrote:
| 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.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| 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.
| steve918 wrote:
| "The shooter was 4.4 miles away, a distance so great, the
| Earth's rotation came into play."
| [deleted]
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| that effect should be constant for the distance and timespan
| of two shots.
| [deleted]
| twothamendment wrote:
| 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.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| 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.
| charlie0 wrote:
| It's wheels away from being a tank.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| 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?
| saeranv wrote:
| > "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.
| mike_d wrote:
| 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).
| kubami wrote:
| Both of which they acknowledge:
|
| "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.
| ourmandave wrote:
| Forget expensive over-the-horizon missiles. Just put these guys
| in your boat tower.
| leveraction wrote:
| I didn't know there were so many firearms enthusiasts on HN. I
| had always (wrongly) assumed I was alone. Cheers to you all.
| ralusek wrote:
| My experience with software developers is that libertarian-
| adjacents are overrepresented among us as compared to the
| general population.
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| What's your favorite lever action?
| [deleted]
| sponaugle wrote:
| 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.
| aliqot wrote:
| Cheers my friend. Don't forget to buy more cleaning oil.
| TylerE wrote:
| I wonder what the rules are? _Naval_ rifle guns have achieved
| hits beyond 20 miles in combat
| Retric wrote:
| 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.
| rjsw wrote:
| In theory it may not be possible for naval guns to hit
| targets 20 miles away. In practice it has happened more than
| once [1] [2].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Calabria [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Glorious#Sinking
| Retric wrote:
| Ships are a lot larger than a 2 inch radius circle. Even
| +/- 30 feet is more than good enough for a long range naval
| shelling.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| Naval guns can have bullets 18" in diameter and weigh 3,848 lbs
| though.
|
| Source: used to work at NSWCDD
| sbaiddn wrote:
| 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.
|
| The fluid flow is the hard one!
| TylerE wrote:
| 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
| Gys wrote:
| > it was nothing short of miraculous for the shot, the 69th
| attempt that morning, to land inside an 8-inch orange bullseye.
|
| Magical even to me. But statistically, if you try often enough?
| infotecht wrote:
| 69th attempt on a one-in-a-million shot (according to them) is
| pretty good!
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| Long range riflery is a wicked fun hobby if you're into
| engineering and/or physics at all.
|
| The hardest part is finding a range that lets you shoot past 300
| yards, is near your house, and doesn't require a pricey
| membership!
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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".
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| What's the point of keeping the shooter anonymous?
| bell-cot wrote:
| 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..."
| wheybags wrote:
| It's a team achievement, this way the shooter doesn't hog the
| limelight.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| It's mostly a pointless record however.
|
| 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.
| lettergram wrote:
| > 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
| [deleted]
| notyourwork wrote:
| 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.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| 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.
| metacritic12 wrote:
| 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.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| 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.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| 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."_
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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
| jcims wrote:
| 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?
| colechristensen wrote:
| Those are just the dynamics. The angle of attack sort of
| wanders around the direction of travel, this is the basics
| of how rifiling helps stability.
| jcims wrote:
| That's wild. I've seen it so many times, but I've never
| seen it discussed anywhere. Thanks!
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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.
| xwdv wrote:
| 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.
| walrus01 wrote:
| On the 60th or more shot is not a record, if you throw enough
| lead down range in the general aim, one will impact eventually.
|
| Something like a 2km repeatable shot done with 338 lapua and 26"
| barrel high accuracy rifle is much more real world.
| hamburglar wrote:
| 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.
| jonah wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a41283557/...
|
| https://snipex.com/alligator
| RajT88 wrote:
| I was surprised to see a big red "BUY" button on that page.
| Surely it can't be that easy?
|
| Upon clicking, "This Account has been Suspended. Contact your
| hosting provider for more information."
| chasd00 wrote:
| 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.
| ketzo wrote:
| 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
| Alupis wrote:
| > does not exactly put one at ease
|
| How many cannons have you heard being used in crimes?
| kadoban wrote:
| 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.
| rolph wrote:
| 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.
|
| this isnt an over the counter purchase.
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| Don't forget you have to submit a form directly to the
| ATF.[0]
|
| [0]: https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/form/form-4-applic
| ation-ta...
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| For each round.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| 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.
| kragen wrote:
| Almost all gun violence is international warfare. Petty
| crime and gang shootings are a rounding error.
| Maursault wrote:
| > 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]
|
| [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/las-vegas-
| shooting/more-am...
|
| [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41488081
|
| [3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/07/guns-
| handgun...
| kragen wrote:
| 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. It turns out that, although it seems
| unlikely to you that almost all gun violence is
| international warfare, it is in fact true.
|
| As you may not know, most of those 45'222 "gun-related
| injuries" 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
| population gun prevalence 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. 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 starved to
| death (more or less at gunpoint) in refugee camps 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.) 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 NBC's claim
| (https://archive.fo/TlCkV); they're 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. They 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. NBC counts it as 0.09 million; they
| didn't even deign to count Vietnamese and Laotian people
| as the Constitutional three-fifths of a person. Of
| course, they also included about a million gun suicides
| in their 1.53 million gun deaths. For some reason, the
| source they cited for this number (which I think is
| roughly correct, if misleading when presented as an
| indicator of gun _violence_ ) was a citation an MMWR
| article from 1994 which documents about 700'000 gun
| deaths, including suicides, since 1968. Evidently their
| 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 in Mexico,
| Brazil, and Nigeria almost all homicides 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 the authors of the NBC article, they don't consider
| human deaths important if the people who die aren't
| white, though NBC 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". The US had 15'700
| homicides that year, according to that report, 2.8% of
| homicides. (You will note that this means that 97.2% of
| homicides, and a somewhat lower fraction of gun
| homicides, were outside the US.)
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 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, 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Why does that worry you?
|
| 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.
| RajT88 wrote:
| 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.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| Absolutely. I made a rather precisely fitted golf ball
| cannon in college with a hypersonic muzzle velocity @
| 357m/s.
|
| I fired it up into the air once and lost sight of the
| golf ball while it was still climbing.
|
| The joys of living in rural, WV!
|
| As it happens I still have the plans:
| https://i.imgur.com/rHo1IO8.png
|
| To scale: https://i.imgur.com/JbdJGQo.png
| BonoboIO wrote:
| You HAVE to write an article about it. Absolutely insane
| specs. Amazing.
| rolph wrote:
| 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
| jonah wrote:
| You might also appreciate Smarter Every Day's Supersonic
| Baseball Cannon:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqidD7kVnxY
|
| (There are several videos in the series.)
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| 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.
| zdragnar wrote:
| 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.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| I mean if you wanna go small caliber, a blowgun is cheap
| and fun. Surprisingly accurate.
| MisterTea wrote:
| 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.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| 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.
| ptomato wrote:
| funnily enough, a 20mm anti-tank rifle _was_ used in a
| crime back in 1965, to bust open a vault at a Brinks
| facility.
| jaclaz wrote:
| It was also functional to the plot of the movie
| Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_and_Lightfoot
|
| very likely the 1965 Brinks vault robbery inspired the
| screenplay, but in the movie it was an anti-aircraft 20
| mm:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oerlikon_20_mm_cannon
| klyrs wrote:
| Impossible to use in a mugging, you mean. Because shooting
| somebody from the next state over is still a crime. Two
| states over, even.
| chroma wrote:
| 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.
|
| 1. https://vpc.org/regulating-the-gun-industry/criminal-
| use-of-...
|
| 2. https://www.wnep.com/article/news/local/lackawanna-
| county/fa...
|
| 3. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-
| the-u.s.-...
| klyrs wrote:
| You brought data to a joke fight, how gauche.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| IIRC a .50 cal rifle was used by the branch davidians at
| waco?
| rpmisms wrote:
| No, that's the ATF lying to cover their ass after
| murdering children. I'd recommend looking into Ruby
| Ridge.
| chroma wrote:
| Yes but they didn't kill anyone with it. I think they
| shot at the helicopter. I don't know if the helicopter
| was shooting at them.
| ascendantlogic wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| hk__2 wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what makes you think that the commenter
| you replied to is in the US?
| orangepurple wrote:
| 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.
|
| Headquarters: 4, 23 Serpnia Lane, Kharkiv 61103, Ukraine
| Tel.: +38 (057) 717-44-44. Mon.-Sat.: 9 a.m. - 7 p.m. (GMT+3)
| E-mail: snipex@snipex.com
| jonah wrote:
| If you look around, you can find photos of them being shown
| off around Ukraine
|
| https://twitter.com/search?q=snipex%20alligator&src=typed_q
| u...
| walrus01 wrote:
| 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.
| rcstank wrote:
| 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.
| rolph wrote:
| i think you need to be FFL 10 to import destructive devices
| or build from specific imported parts
| sbierwagen wrote:
| 26 U.S.C. SS 5845
|
| (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.
| kragen wrote:
| 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"?)
| sbierwagen wrote:
| >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.
| kragen wrote:
| I see, thanks!
| rolph wrote:
| one half inch is 50 cal or 12.7 mm.
|
| [25.4 mm == 1 inch]
|
| 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
|
| i think i was looking at the 20mm cannon as well
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32957960
|
| but posted over here.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _"It's a one-in-a-million shot. They said it's not
| statistically repeatable," he said._
|
| > _... it was nothing short of miraculous for the shot, the 69th
| attempt that morning, to land inside an 8-inch orange bullseye._
| jwally wrote:
| Honest question:
|
| Why does earths rotation matter?
|
| You and the target are both moving at the same speed throughout
| the bullets flight in the same direction - why should it factor
| in?
| subhro wrote:
| Coriolis effect. Google it.
| aero-glide2 wrote:
| The target moves at different speed because earth's rotation
| varies with longitude (highest at equator, 0 at poles). That's
| my understanding atleast!
| aero-glide2 wrote:
| *with latitude
| dmurray wrote:
| 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).
| _s wrote:
| 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 :)
| kragen wrote:
| 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.
| exabrial wrote:
| Two quotes I thought were noteworthy:
|
| > 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.
|
| To give an idea of how difficult this is....
| akerl_ wrote:
| 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.
| mod wrote:
| After four miles, it's a little shocking to me.
|
| And I'm into shooting sports.
| Alupis wrote:
| > ...of a 422-grain copper bullet...
|
| > 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.416_Barrett
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| For the non-gun people in here that is an absolute
| _chonker_ of a bullet.
|
| The .556 (very common AR round) is 112. 9mm common in
| handguns is around 115.
|
| 422 grain = 27.35 grams / 0.9646 ounces.
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| 5.56 is 45 - 75 gn, typically 55 or 62.
| OJFord wrote:
| > .556
|
| Do you mean 5.56mm, the NATO standard small arms round
| iirc? i.e. as an imperial measurement it'd be about the
| same as a .22, not .556.
| mburee wrote:
| 0.556 cm ;)
| mod wrote:
| > BC (Ballistic Coefficient) [?] 1.103
|
| Wow.
| mrb wrote:
| Doing the exact math, a 422-grain bullet shot at 3300
| feet/sec is 13,833 joules of kinetic energy (.5 * mass *
| speed*2 = energy)
|
| Right before hitting the target it slowed down to 600
| feet/sec, meaning it lost 97% of its kinetic energy
| during the flight.
| infogulch wrote:
| It was freefalling for 24 seconds. 600fps downwards isn't even
| remotely surprising to me.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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?
| williamscales wrote:
| The article briefly mentions towards the end that the shooter
| was on a ridge above the target
| causality0 wrote:
| Interesting. I wonder if laws against firing a gun into the
| sky were a factor in that decision.
| pdpi wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| bergenty wrote:
| What does a BB gun have to do with this, why are you making
| that comparison?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| It's a reference point.
| lumost wrote:
| 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?
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| If they just put that weapon in a bench rest and kept firing,
| how tight a group would it shoot?
| Alupis wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Could you build a smarter bullet that could actively
| compensate?
| Alupis wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M982_Excalibur
| wahern wrote:
| The U.S. has apparently sent M982 Excalibur shells to
| Ukraine, according to leaked budget documents:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-08/most-
| accu...
|
| 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).
| myrmidon wrote:
| Russia has the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krasnopol_
| (weapon_system), which is quite comparable and was used
| in the war already.
|
| 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.
| topspin wrote:
| > 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.
| _kbh_ wrote:
| > 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.
| tempay wrote:
| 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.
| _kbh_ wrote:
| > 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.
| tempay wrote:
| I'm only directly aware of speculation with regard to
| there being a possible distinction such as
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-60664169
| _kbh_ wrote:
| I don't see that as being a distinction but more Russia
| just rattling the nuclear sabre.
|
| They have been doing it since the start of the war and do
| it about every single large shipment of weapons to
| Ukraine.
|
| I suspect its mostly for a internal audience but also to
| make the west scared to send weapons which clearly hasn't
| worked.
| greedo wrote:
| 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.
| boc wrote:
| 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.
| wahern wrote:
| Smart bullets exist:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_bullet
|
| Here's a live-fire video of the EXACTO:
| https://youtu.be/YoOaJclkSZg
|
| All the available information is several years old, now.
| I figure either the EXACTO (or successor) has secretly
| been deployed, or it proved impractical.
| FlingPoo wrote:
| At those ranges you'd likely have to take into account the
| Coriolis Effect as well.
| tunesmith wrote:
| I wonder how the sound would work?
|
| 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.
| gibspaulding wrote:
| 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.
| oliwarner wrote:
| _A_ shot?
|
| 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.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| 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:
|
| 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
| major505 wrote:
| ITs amazing how much tech made firearms more acurate. This days
| I was watching 9hole reviews where they had a long range course
| up to 600 yards.
|
| He done it with every iteration of the AR-15.
|
| The last one was a WWST rifle (a moderized AR with super light
| materials), and the thing shot like a laser beam.
|
| https://youtu.be/-QoQznLh29Q
| Jemm wrote:
| 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.
| timcavel wrote:
| wiradikusuma wrote:
| 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).
| harha wrote:
| I just drew [1] the radius from my home for comparison, this is
| unimaginably far.
|
| [1]: https://www.calcmaps.com/map-radius/
| Sporktacular wrote:
| ""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.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| > "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
| rabi_molar wrote:
| 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.
| vitaflo wrote:
| 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.
| sbaiddn wrote:
| 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.
| chroma wrote:
| 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.
|
| 1. https://nomadrifleman.com/world-record-shot/
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXVcXmyKpeI
|
| > At this distance you'll also have to take the Coriolis effect
| into account.
|
| COD did it first
| srvmshr wrote:
| Two interesting observations from this article:
|
| * 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.
| twawaaay wrote:
| 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.
| somat wrote:
| 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.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| And before the electronic computers, we used mechanical
| computers!
| https://hackaday.com/2013/03/13/retrotechtacular-
| mechanical-...
| iancmceachern wrote:
| And before that we used human computers!
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)
| adrian_b wrote:
| The first job that my father got (around 1953) was as a
| "computer", at an astronomical observatory.
|
| However, such jobs have started to disappear very quickly
| after that time, with the spread of the electronic
| computers.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| And conversely we sometimes use direct fire weapons such as
| machine guns in an indirect fire mode.
| Alupis wrote:
| The article mentions it's a variable optic with 6-35x. 35
| power is nothing at 4.4 miles... the target was probably
| smaller than the reticle crosshair.
|
| For reference, most of your typical spotting scopes are
| 60x... and even at 1,000 yards things are hard to see.
|
| Here's an article with helpful images through several popular
| spotting scopes for comparison[1].
|
| [1] https://www.pewpewtactical.com/best-spotting-scopes/
| hattmall wrote:
| He's likely not seeing the target at all. Spotters are
| giving him directionals.
| hajile wrote:
| 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.
| nullc wrote:
| 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.
| tromp wrote:
| 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.
| simonh wrote:
| 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.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| 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.
| Alupis wrote:
| 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.
| leereeves wrote:
| The article said the bullet was:
|
| _" 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."_
|
| and:
|
| _" a 422-grain copper bullet"_
| Alupis wrote:
| 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.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| >But the bullet itself is probably "off the shelf" and so
| would be the powder and case too.
|
| At this level I wouldn't be surprised if they did
| something ridiculous like CNC machine a copper billet
| bullet to ~micron tolerance/consistency.
|
| That said, from the pictures they appear to at least
| start with a commercial or 'to-spec' round from the
| company Unknown Munitions.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| It is a "turned bullet".
|
| I have a bunch, you can kick them out on a cnc lathe.
| Super easy. Not even cost prohibitive depending on how
| serious you are about ELR.
| Vexs wrote:
| The bullets in this case were .416 422gn cutting edge
| mtac bullets- this one, specifically.
| https://cuttingedgebullets.com/416-422gr-mtac-match-
| tactical
|
| Taken from their press release here:
| https://nomadrifleman.com/world-record-shot/
| Vexs wrote:
| For those curious, the specific scope is this one:
| https://vortexoptics.com/razor-hd-gen-iii-6-36x56.html
| throw0101c wrote:
| Technical minutia curiosity: I wonder if they used MOA or
| MRAD.
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minute_and_second_of_arc#Fire
| a...
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milliradian
| Cd00d wrote:
| What is that they have mounted on the front of the scope?
| dymk wrote:
| Looks like a Charlie TARAC from the youtube comments -
| https://tacomhq.com/charlie-tarac/
| throw0101c wrote:
| This device was probably used to accomplish the longest-
| distance (3541m) sniper kill:
|
| * https://www.gunsamerica.com/digest/tech-behind-record-
| settin...
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I read GP's fascination with some surely extreme optic...
|
| Then your post to see, oh, I have that one.
|
| It's good, but I've had better, and it's heavy which doesn't
| matter in this application.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| 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.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://precisionrifleblog.com/2020/09/05/best-elr-scope-
| and...
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| 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!
| Sporktacular wrote:
| From the photo of the scope on the gun, it's pitched down so
| much the barrel is almost in the way.
|
| EDIT, and I see now that's why they put the periscope ahead
| of it. That lets them dial past the scope's zeroing limits.
| alostpuppy wrote:
| I really expected it to be more expensive.
| walrus01 wrote:
| 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.
| hajile wrote:
| 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.
| gbrindisi wrote:
| 7.08 km
| below43 wrote:
| Thank you!
| [deleted]
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