A 150-gr .30-'06 bullet will return to earth at 320 feet per second.
A 718-gr .50-caliber bullet will return to earth at about 500 feet per second, with energy of about 400 foot pounds.
A 1000-pound 12-inch artillery shell will return with a speed of about 1300-1400 feet per second and over 28,000,000 ft. lbs. of energy.
- from "Hatcher's Notebook", p514
Think of all the fun those guys at Hatcher's had doing the field tests to figure that stuff out!
ReplyDeleteI know, they did it indoors via math, but I still like the visual of a couple of guys at opposite ends of a field:
"Hey Stan, be ready to measure the speed of this here 1000 lb. round."
"Go ahead Pete, fire away."
Some of the tests of the .30-'06 were actual test-firings, straight up, over a body of water. Among their findings were that bullets return to earth "tail down" due to spin imparted by rifling of the barrel. Some boat-tailed .30-'06 bullets were unstable to the point where a burst fired from a machinegun would have some bullets "nose-over". They inferred this when bullets from a single burst came down in two groups, the first in 66 seconds and the second group in one minute and forty-six seconds.
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