MiracleOfSound said:
Eat your heart out Hutch, Optic and T-Squared.... this is a real pro-sniper.
Now I don't know anything about sniping but my guess is that this was an extreme feat of skill, any gun owners care to explain exactly how difficult this must have been and what was involved in hitting someone from that far?
And I have been told by a buddy that at that distance with a 50 Cal bullet, due to the air it pushes up it wouldn't even have to hit you to kill you, is this true?
Ahh,finally, my area of expertise. Bona Fides, I used to carry the coveted "B4" designator, which denotes a graduate of the Long Range Infiltration and Interdiction (Sniper) school. I've trained on three primary sniper weapons, and none of them was capable of this feat, and I'll be the first to admit I wouldn't give myself one chance in fifty of hitting the shot this guy did, much less twice. It's impressive on the sort of scale I can't really convey. Long range marksmanship has always been an amalgamation of science and art, and this guy is a wizard.
The L115A3 is a hell of a rifle, and one of the most capable of extreme ranges in any nations arsenal (barring custom SF jobs). And worthy of note is that it is NOT a .50, but rather a .338 Lapua Magnum chambering, a relatively recent cartridge developed in the '80s. Also note that Harrison stated that he had taken nine ranging shots of the area in question beforehand, which lends credence to his amazing shots.
Even so, this shot was at more than twice the effective range of the rifle. Let me illustrate the difficulty here, discounting wind, (because Harrison said the wind was calm, a true rarity). Hold a bullet out at arms length and drop it, thats what happens when a bullet leaves the barrel, it drops as fast as gravity demands, it just also travels forward at high velocity. At a thousand meters, the drop on my personal weapon was 112 inches. That means I had to adjust the scope to aim 112 inches above the target for the bullet to drop into the zone. Now, the .338 is a faster cartridge than the .308 I used, but still, figure the bullet drop is at least in the same ballpark (one chart I consulted listed the .338 at 137 inches drop at 1k meters). Now note that the shot taken was 2.48 kilometers, or two and a half times the length of my benchmark shots, and recall that the bullet loses velocity over distance, and so describes an increasing parabola. The drop of that bullet would be measured in tens of meters. Now figure that at standard loadings, the .338 travels in the 2800fps category, making hte travel time to target almost three seconds. A human being can move a lot in three seconds. I hope this gives y'all some inkling, but suffice it to say, the more you know about this sort of work, the more impressive the shot is.
And at close range (less than 600 meters), a .50 can injure without contact, but I doubt there would be anything left at 2.5 klicks. Remember we're not talking about a .50 here.
