"Heck of a shot" Topic

Apologies if this is old news but I found it amazing considering the distance involved.

link

A 10 second flight… shoot, light a cigarette, take a long puff, exhale and look to the scope to check your shot…. Simply amazing.

How do you get the target to stand still for 10 seconds?
I wouldn't be surprised if he moved into the path or someone else got hit.

Yep when I was in the defence business back in the 1980's the idea of a 50 cal snipers rifle for shooting at artillery crew was proposed. Well it looks as if they are making (and using) them. Hell of a shot indeed.
I often think it would be a good idea to have an armoured vehicle for sniping with a long range small calibre cannon under a dome (so the enemy cannot see the way the gun is pointing) with enhanced targeting and stabilisation. To kill individuals at long ranges.

I think an armoured vehicle would defeat the point – snipers prefer the target to be largely unaware they are there till they 'reach out and touch someone'.

Impressive!!

I heard a former Canadian sniper, now working for a firearms company, speak at a hunting convention, giving a talk on long-range hunting shots (much less than this range though!) and his boss, a friend of mine, had the twitches the whole time that he would slip and start speaking about the target being a "him" rather than an "it".

3500m?!?

Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaang.

I think I need to send a check to the JTF2 offices to buy that sniper and his spotter a beer.

I mean, a .50BMG should have dropped subsonic by then, which makes for a whole lot of uncertainty about where the bullet is going!

I wonder if this was one of those intelligent bullets that tracks its target once it is in flight?

Coopman,

Nope, in Canada we still put all the intelligence in the shooter, not the bullets…

The described shot is pretty amazing. It makes me wonder what the ranges were in WW1 and WW 2 when British and Commonwealth units were firing machine guns to provide indirect fire support. There was very little precision with mg indirect firing (compared to sniping), but the principle of firing in a parabolic arc to get more range is similar. Were they engaging targets several km away?

@Pattus Magnus: From what I've been able to read on MG Bombardments (particularly with ye olde Vickers MG), up to 4100m away.

Direct fire up to about 2000m, and you can set up grazing fire where the bullets are never more than 1.8m above ground for about 600m or so (basically, imagine a line of death 600m long stretching from your gun muzzle!) The issue with taking shots at more than 600m is that you need to aim high enough that you don't have any rounds close to the ground up close anymore.

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From some more wikidiving, this shot was WAAAAY past the .50BMG's supersonic range (probably 1700m with match ammo, 1500m with MG fodder). Weird stuff happens when you get close to the speed of sound (Bernoulli's theorem REVERSES at the speed of sound in the fluid), so bullets have a bad habit of getting off-target.

After this, I would expect IS folks to get jumpy, never standing or sitting in one spot for more than five seconds at a time. :)

Wow!!!

Dan

I deeply mourn the loss of a great bullet.

He was aiming for the horse…

@Norman: And that pistol bullet sure got there fast, didn't it? Often, especially in old movies, the shot and the kill happen almost simultaneously. (it's especially stupid when it's a bow and arrow, e.g. Robin of Sherwood, "Lord of the Trees", final scene)

There were exceptions: "Billy Two Hats" made a point of following the bullet from the Sharps across the salt flats until it hit Gregory Peck's horse; that was an incredibly long shot. But it was plagiarizing "Valdez Is Coming", where Burt Lancaster did the same thing a bunch of times with his Sharps: "Boom!" (wait for it …) "Whack!" down goes another bad guy.

And another western that I am blanking on, both name of and actors in, had a scene where the ambushers are up on the cliff, and our heroes are trying to take shelter in sagebrush, heh! Up on the cliff, silhouetted against the sky, you see a puff of smoke, then a couple of seconds later, "zip"! goes the bullet and one of the party flies back dead, then "Boom!" comes the sound. Very cool. A sharpshooter among the heroes did the reverse to the sniper on the cliff And it was an interesting technical nicety that he took the bullet with surprise (didn't hear it coming), dropped his rifle and slumped as the sound arrived.

Anybody remember what the name of the movie is? I'd like to know, and who starred in it, of course……..

Dumb question probably but are modern spec forces sniper teams packing ballistic computers? I'm pretty sure a modern phone or similar hand held device would have sufficient processing power.

I believe that most anyone packing a Barrett has a ballistic computer module. Not sure about other weapons. And there are several ballistic calculator apps available for the modern cellphone, I have Strelok loaded on my phone but I need to update my data. Not really a reason to use it, I don't shoot enough (or at long enough ranges) for a ballistic calculator to improve my shooting.

I also mis-spoke about the supersonic range of the super-match ammo for a .50cal, the heavy 750grain A-MAX bullet is supersonic to 2000 or 2100m, but that still puts this shot well outside supersonic range where bullets do weird things.

Definitely need to send JTF2 a check to buy this sniper team a beer.

"The Hunting Party" – a vengeful Gene Hackman jumps at the chance to turn a rich man's hunting trip into an impromptu manhunt, chasing outlaw Oliver Reed's gang and their captive, Candice "obligatory in a 1970's western" Bergen.

Ironically, the weapons shown are some kind of sporterized short-barreled carbine with a Martini-type lever action.
I don't think they'd be anything special in terms of long-range accuracy.

@Norman: Nope, that's not the movie plot, even though I don't really remember the plot much at all.

Then color me intrigued! Not often I come up dry on a western.
There's a couple of long-range shooting scenes with noticeable flight time in Eastwood's 'Joe Kidd', but I assume a man who recognizes unattributed M7 quotes will already be familiar with that one.

I conducted joint patrols with Canadian snipers from PPCLI in Kandahar province. I found them to be exceptionally professional and capable. They had .50 Cals then, we only had the L96 which was 7.62. We learned quite a bit from them.

@Norman: Yes, you would think that, but it is Joe Kidd. I've only seen it twice, many years ago. The shooting scene I remember with the authentic sound delay is about an hour in. James Wainwright bites the dust.YouTube link (Don't ask me why I didn't remember this being a Clint Eastwood movie.)