Bullet drop

[WNxKenwayy]

Originally Posted by Sneak Attack

good thing i said nothing about muzzle velocity and just spoke of air resistance, which determines momentum, without air resistance all bullets would travel at the same speed from the second they came out of the barrel to the second they hit the ground. i know there is bullet drop.

i was just saying that this sentence "In RL weight has a lot to do with bullet drop.
IE If you shoot a brick it will not travel as far as if you shot a hollow plastic brick of the same size. " it doesnt make any sense. weight doesnt effect drop, gravity and resistance do. and a normal brick will go farther then a plastic one.
(throw one of those plastic whiffle balls {without holes} and a regular baseball and the regular baseball will go alot farther because it has more momentum.)

Air resistence does not determine momentum. It is only a force acting to on the bullet to reduce its velocity, that's it. It does play a PART in momentum if you want to talk about it like that, but the weight of the round and its initial force, the bullet charge. Everything else, gravity/air resistece, barrel resistence, is just forces acting on the bullets initial momentum to slow it down.

[Gecko1969]

Unless the round is generating lift some how (think some type of tank rounds use fins that maybe able to do this) it will drop at the same rate no matter what. The distance it travels is another story and is what many of you are talking about with drag, momentum, muzzle velocity, and so on.

In my mind's eye I can only think of one situation where a round might generate lift. If the round was shaped such that it tumbled or twisted such that it created a low pressure area above the round which would generate lift. This is how a baseball "slides" when thrown by a skilled pitcher. The shape of the baseball (a sphere which shot is similar to) and how it is spinning and which direction it is thrown create the lift needed to change it's direction up/down and side to side.

I am no expert in munitions, but I can imagine there are rounds made with these properties but most rifle rounds are not. I have suffered through Calculus based physics series for engineering however.

[WNxKenwayy]

Originally Posted by Gecko1969

Unless the round is generating lift some how (think some type of tank rounds use fins that maybe able to do this) it will drop at the same rate no matter what. The distance it travels is another story and is what many of you are talking about with drag, momentum, muzzle velocity, and so on.

In my mind's eye I can only think of one situation where a round might generate lift. If the round was shaped such that it tumbled or twisted such that it created a low pressure area above the round which would generate lift. This is how a baseball "slides" when thrown by a skilled pitcher. The shape of the baseball (a sphere which shot is similar to) and how it is spinning and which direction it is thrown create the lift needed to change it's direction up/down and side to side.

I am no expert in munitions, but I can imagine there are rounds made with these properties but most rifle rounds are not. I have suffered through Calculus based physics series for engineering however.

Rifle rounds to not generate lift.

Heres the problem a lot of you are running into. Yes, all bullets will "drop" at the same rate more or less due to physics. However, one round will go a long further in that same amount of time. So a .50 will drop less at 300m than a 5.56mm.