Where Does the Bullet Go?
January 4th, 2009 by Syd
A good one on ballistics from Joe Huffman:
I have worked with the mathematics of exterior ballistics for so long that I sometimes forget the general nature of the path of a rifle bullet to it’s target is not mind boggling obvious. I was reminded of this by an email I received today:
Need a answer: I was told that when shot a 30 cal. bullet goes up and makes an arc to the target, when held level. What happens, say at 100 yards.?
This email caused me to have a flashback to when I was in grade-school (yes Kris, firearms had been invented by the time I left grade-school).
When I was about the fourth grade a friend of mind, Verl (yeah, kids had strange names back in those days), insisted that the bullet would rise after it left the barrel of a rifle. I didn’t believe it and asked how long it took before it when into orbit (or some such thing that pointed out the absurdity of his claim). He didn’t know but asked his dad and came back to school and explained it went up for a while then came back down. My knowledge of and ability to articulate the physics of gravity and moving objects was limited and although I was profoundly unsatisfied with this explanation I couldn’t refute his assertion that it was true.
Later I made sense of it and eventually I wrote a computer programs that accurately predicts the path of a bullet as it leaves the muzzle. I am now much more capable of articulating the physics and will now attempt do so.