Gun Mythbusters...

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Vaccuum or not, a .50 BMG will go faster and farther than a .22lr. The .22 will be down before the .50 reaches the limit.
Zero is determined by the distance from the muzzle to the target. A rifle is usually sighted in at 100 yd.s. The gun is "zeroed" at 100yd.s. A .22 magnum can hit a 100 yd. target but the bullet will travel up to get there due to the arc caused by compensating for bullet drop (loss of energy).
Releasing a slide on an empty chamber should not hurt a pistol. The force should be less than, or same as slamming home from a fired bullet. Guns are designed to take it.
A large (.45) bullet hitting a stationary (man) definitely carries force with it. Imagine hitting a bumblebee on a bicycle at 10 mph. Now imagine the same only on a motorcycle at 60 mph. That bee could knock an unwary rider off the motorcycle, but not likely off a bicycle. The main difference is a bullet is nearly solid and is moving much faster (and weighs more). And getting wounded hurts a lot. A man hit with a .45 will, 99 times out of 100, be knocked down. (But not always.)
The guy that decided to reduce ammo to .223 had to be a damn liberal! ("Oh! That poor enemy. The (.308, .30'06) really messed him up!. We'll use smaller ammo so they don't get hurt so bad.") I wonder why the govt. is rebuilding (.308) M-14s with such haste? Could it be because they're BETTER?
(This will raise some hackles!) I think the Mini-14 would have been a better performer than the M-16! Colt "needed" the contract to stay in business and the govt. knuckled under to appease Colt. The historic, but going under, Colt firm was, thus, saved from extinction, :cool: and our soldiers hampered by a tempermental, over-complicated club.
 
Myth: bullets naturally fly in an arc trajectory.
Truth: gravity is a constant. Shoot a rifle perfectly horizontally, and drop a bullet at the same precise moment. Both bullets will hit the ground at the same time.* Afterall, Newton was a genius!

*Except with the curvature of the Earth. The bullet shot from a rifle will necessarily drop slightly further, thus take a miniscule longer time to strike the ground.
 
Those are all good myths, B Franklin!
1) The original poster didn't say "zeroed", he said "parallel". The two bullets will hit the ground at the exact same time.
2) Releasing the slide on an empty mag will result in more force, not less. the action of picking the cartridge off the top of the mag absorbs some of the energy of the slide.
3) The issue is not about getting knocked down from an injury, the issue is getting knocked down by the pure physics of an object in motion. A .45 will not knock down a man, ever, period.
4) The M-16 is a far superior gun than a Mini-14, and in tight quarter combat the m-16 is a battle proven, dependable, accurate gun.
 
The actual wording in the Hague document is "unnecessary suffering". Since more rapid incapacitation is necessary to achieve legitimate military objectives, expanding bullets are not a violation as long as a good case can be made that the bullet design employed produces more rapid incapacitation than FMJ.

Michael Courtney
 
Yes, but that really means nothing anymore. The convention has been accepted as mandating non-expanding rounds for over a century now. It would take a truly bold commander-in-chief to buck this tradition. Esp. since so many at the Pentagon would oppose the change.
 
This declaration to Hague (I), 1899 prohibits expanding bullets: Declaration on the Use of Bullets Which Expand or Flatten Easily in the Human Body; July 29, 1899
 
Here's one that bugs the crap out of me (heard at a gun store):

"This lube is thinner so it soaks into the pores of the metal and stays with the gun longer. It soaks in even better if the gun is warm."
 
B.Franklin

I can tell you with absolute certainty that being hit by a bee while on a motorcycle going 60 miles an hour will not, in any circumstance, knock you off. I've been hit with so many bugs, stones, cig. buts, over the years from riding and not once have I been thrown from my bike. Heck I once got wached in the eye by a june bug, all it did was spatter across my face, granted it distracted me so that I almost hit a pheasant, but thats besides the point.

no disrespect or anything, but I suggest that perhaps its time you take a refresher course in physics.
 
Well, if to come to the 2 bullets (.22LR and .50BGM), then they do not fall at the same rate. Due velocity (.22LR - 300 m/s, .50BMG - 900 m/s : approximate values :eek: ) the .22LR has a downward acceleration of 9.79 m/s^2, .50BMG has 9.68 m/s^2 . The difference in falling times is approx 1%, so if if the .22LR falls down after 100 seconds (for example) the .50BMG hits the ground 1 second later. Even in vaccuum as the effects of atmosphere and the Earth's curve haven't been taken into account.

Newton said that 2 different masses fall down (no sideways movement) at the same rate in vaccuum, he said nothing about dropping a bullet and shooting one from same altitude IIRC.
 
Bullet drop

This is a basic physics equation that i remember doing when I was a freshman in the Engineering program. Both bullets hit the ground at the same time, the .50 cal will just hit farther away. The .50 bullet experiences a greater force caused by gravity which compensats for the greater mass. This is the basic physics equation F=ma where the Force is equal to mass times acceleration. A more clear example of this would be: which hits the ground first, a .50 cal bullet fired from a gun or one dropped. The answer is still at the same time because the force caused by gravity is the same on both. Horizontal velocity doesnt mean that it stays in the air longer it just travels farther over the time that it takes to hit the ground. So the faster it goes, the farther it goes. I hate to break it to you Medusa, but a vaccum means no air, hense no atmosphere. The curvature of the earth doesnt really matter because the earth isnt a perfect sphere, the bullet doesnt go far enough for this to take effect. Local terrain variences have a greater effect that the curvature of the earth. (i.e. fire it towards a mountian and the ground rises, not falls)
 
re:

Quote:

>Releasing a slide on an empty chamber should not hurt a pistol. The force should be less than, or same as slamming home from a fired bullet. Guns are designed to take it.<
******************

Wrong. The impact forces involved are not the same.
 
I'm glad a lot of us were paying attention in school!

Remember, krochus' post stated that the guns were parallel to the horizon, not the sights. If both barrels were exactly parallel to the ground, the difference in zero between the .22 and the .50 would not matter. As soon as each bullet exits the muzzle, gravity is exerting a downards force on each of them. It's also why mentioned shooting the bullet off of a cliff in my post, because that's cheating. ;)

Does anyone remember vector mathematics?

If you can find a vacuum chamber big enough, you can test this out by dropping a bowling ball and a baseball from the same height. Even though the masses between the objects vary greatly, they will impact the ground at the exact same time. Even if you were to throw the baseball exactly parallel to the ground, and dropped the bowling ball straight down, you'd get the same result.
 
Myth: 6 Feet of water will stop any bullet as effectivly as 6 feet of concerete?


is this true?
 
True - I can't think of any bullet that will penetrate more than a foot or three of water.
 
Perhaps - I don't know much about artillery-shells, just handgun and rifle bullets, which is what I assumed you were enquiring about.
 
Myth: 6 Feet of water will stop any bullet as effectivly as 6 feet of concerete?
Click to expand...

Six feet of concrete should stop most bullets...:D

I am amazed at the M1 Garand rounds stuck in the dirt at the 100 yard range for the CMP shoots. A couple of inches of dirt will stop 'em.
 
I think with the water, it all depends on the round, the angle of incedent(sp?), speed of the round, temp. and salinity of the water.( which would effect its density)
 
Mythbusters did the "fire rounds into water" thing some time ago. Pretty much every supersonic FMJ round they fired disintegrated after 2 feet of water - even a .50 BMG. They did not fire AP rounds, I suspect they would do better.

Pistol rounds, on the other hand, penetrated 9 FEET of water and still had enough energy to penetrate 8 inches of gelatin.
 
The alloys used in springs, their temper and heat treating, and the number and type of coils they have are designed to have a certain amount of compression or tension applied to them before they fail. This is called the elastic limit.

Compressing or stretching a spring past the elastic limit is known as plastic deformation.

Any engineer worth his or her salt in the past 150 years and probably more, knows how to design things so that springs are never taxed past this point in the normal functioning of whatever device they're used. Before that time, experience and instinct guided them

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articl...27/ai_99130369

Unloading/relaoding your magazines and rotating ammunition is not a bad idea, but it has more to do with dirt, case deformation, and binding, and nothing to do with the spring taking a "set".
Click to expand...

Actually I think the elastic limit is an arbitrary sort of thing. When you're talking about metal theres always going to be slight permanent deformation, so theoretically when you use springs, you are weakening them.... But I think loading and unloading once a day would ruin them much quicker.
 
Err... close enough for government work but...

In a vacuum, the .22, the .50BMG and the feather you shot horizontally/dropped from the same height at the same time will all land at the same time (plus or minus the frikkin' small differences due to curvature of earth/variation in force of gravity over distance traveled, whatever). But in atmosphere, the differences can be quite interesting.

Someone mentioned the "magnus" force earlier. I'm not entirely sure that's the right term (but don't have any specific reason to doubt it), but it's a pretty interesting force. With a right hand twist, the right side of the bullet is moving down and the left side is moving up. A wind from the right side of the bullet sees, effectively, a curve ball (or topspin in tennis/volleyball/golf/whatever). This "topspin" creates a high pressure below the bullet and a low pressure above the bullet, causing the bullet to drop faster than it otherwise would. A wind from the left does the opposite, it sees "backspin" on the bullet, pushing it up. Depending on the windspeed, masses of the bullets, diameters (which we know), smoothness of the surface of the bullets, and rotational speed, I have no idea whether the .22 or the .50 is affected more.

Also, whenever the bullet isn't going perfectly horizontal, there is a vertical component to the drag force, which adds to (or subtracts from) the force of gravity. So, the .50BMG could end up falling more slowly than the .22 (in atmosphere, assuming it wasn't some weird load that was going really, really slowly)

It's been a while since I took physics, so I probably got a few things wrong, so, fire away! (But I'm pretty confident that the basics are right)

Nate
 
jlbraun said:
Pistol rounds, on the other hand, penetrated 9 FEET of water and still had enough energy to penetrate 8 inches of gelatin.
Click to expand...
Now that I didn't know - very interesting, hmmm.
 
If you fired a chicken and an egg from two guns in a vacume at the same time which would hit the ground first? The chicken? Or the egg?


Or maybe the feathers that got blown off the chicken?

What grain is a standard chicken anyway? Or for that matter, what is the best twist rate for said chicken?

:D
 
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