lot of bogus info in this thread
i'd encourage you to stop and think for a minute about how much rain is actually in the air. a moderately heavy rain would be 1" of rain per hour. terminal velocity on a raindrop is going to be between 10-20 mph depending on size. converting units, it takes 1 / 352 of a second to travel one inch. so if you took every drop that crosses your bullet's path for the entire hour, it would pass in a tiny fraction of a second. there are 3600 seconds in an hour. so you can see the odds of your bullet actually impacting a rain drop in a heavy downpour are actually extremely small.
however, if it DOES impact a drop, as was stated above, it will affect the bullet. there are a few youtube videos out there of experiments where they hit a drop on purpose. I shoot in rain and snow every chance i get, and matches are often in inclement weather. I can't ever recall having my trajectory affected by rain or snow. (though watching your trace in both is really cool)
regarding the shockwave affect.... i'll offer this for your reading pleasure http://naca.central.cranfield.ac.uk/reports/arc/cp/0827.pdf
practical effects of shooting in the rain are:
rain makes it easier to estimate the wind
harder to see through ocular lens (objective isn't affected quite as much)
causes a lot of popped primers due to overpressure from wet ammo
harder to write on wet databooks and PDAs (though i have lots of write in the rain notebooks)
you can pretty much ignore the changes to ballistics other than associated humidity/DA changes
i'd encourage you to stop and think for a minute about how much rain is actually in the air. a moderately heavy rain would be 1" of rain per hour. terminal velocity on a raindrop is going to be between 10-20 mph depending on size. converting units, it takes 1 / 352 of a second to travel one inch. so if you took every drop that crosses your bullet's path for the entire hour, it would pass in a tiny fraction of a second. there are 3600 seconds in an hour. so you can see the odds of your bullet actually impacting a rain drop in a heavy downpour are actually extremely small.
however, if it DOES impact a drop, as was stated above, it will affect the bullet. there are a few youtube videos out there of experiments where they hit a drop on purpose. I shoot in rain and snow every chance i get, and matches are often in inclement weather. I can't ever recall having my trajectory affected by rain or snow. (though watching your trace in both is really cool)
regarding the shockwave affect.... i'll offer this for your reading pleasure http://naca.central.cranfield.ac.uk/reports/arc/cp/0827.pdf
practical effects of shooting in the rain are:
rain makes it easier to estimate the wind
harder to see through ocular lens (objective isn't affected quite as much)
causes a lot of popped primers due to overpressure from wet ammo
harder to write on wet databooks and PDAs (though i have lots of write in the rain notebooks)
you can pretty much ignore the changes to ballistics other than associated humidity/DA changes