The sniper is the one military role that video games might actually adequately prepare us for. Its mostly lying down far away from the fight, lining bad-guy faces up with the scope and using some simple hand/eye coordination to blow them away. Even super realistic movies like The Hurt Locker dont make it look all that different from playing a game of Callfield: Battleduty. Getty Hell, this Iraq bullshit looks easy. The Reality: Actual sniping is less about lining up the cross hairs and more about having a complex understanding of physics. Its one thing to shoot a guy standing 20, 50 or 100 feet away. Its another thing entirely to make that shot from 1.5 miles away, as Canadian sniper Rob Furlong did. At that distance, you have to take wind resistance into account, because its going to slow your bullet down. And you also have to keep in mind that your bullet will drop while its in flight. Furlongs shot may have taken up to four seconds to hit, and dropped 256 feet on its way to hitting that terrorist. This means that he had to aim several hundred feet above the head of his target to make that shot. Wind resistance and drop arent the only things to keep in mind, either. Gunpowder burns at a higher rate when its cold and a lower rate when its warm, which causes bullets to hit high in warm weather and low in cold weather. And while youre checking on the weather, make sure to pay attention to the elevation -- the thin air at higher altitudes makes your bullets fly faster and flatter. Getty Sir, Im packing up. All Ive shot in the last four hours are two scientists, a climber and a few penguins. Sounding a lot more complicated now? Because we havent even gotten into how the length and twist of the barrel will affect your shots. Or how the rotation of the Earth can mess things up. Snipers arent deadly because they carry the biggest guns; theyre deadly because theyve learned how to weaponize math. Furlong didnt do something as trivial as point a stick really well; he figured out the calculations necessary to arrive at the coefficient of death in the middle of a goddamn gunfight. Now, he didnt do it entirely in his head: Professional snipers have cheat sheets of data and theorems that inform their shots. They also often assemble DOPE logs (Data on Personal Equipment) to catalog and compensate for all the little variables in their own equipment. But whether or not theyre using cheat sheets, a shot is not just pulling the trigger -- its factoring in an astronomical number of variables and arriving at a mathematically sound solution, and then using that math to explode somebody elses head.
Posted on: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 18:34:02 +0000
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