Re: Is this safe?
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: The Mechanic</div><div class="ubbcode-body"> The concern is not the unlikelihood of a skyward tilted artillery round. It is of a ricochet from a steel target or rock from a miss. Even a wood or steel framing of a target stand hit correctly could send one downrange further. If you have seen one of the BIG machine gun shoots that tracers are used you will often see ricochets.
Ok I found one. This is the Big Sandy night shoot. Just check out how some of these rounds could EASILY go that distance. some rounds have tracer burnout around 4 seconds and are still climbing.
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Thank you for taking the time to reply with a informed post. I still stand by what I said though. THe video you posted is hard to make out, but I get the point you were trying to make. On the other hand, take a look at the video more closely. All the very high fliers look like thtey were bounced off the ground at a short distance(100-200 yards?) and go high because of the angle from the machine gun to the ground. This ALSO means MUCH of the energy was absorbed by the impact in the ground. So the bullet has enough energy to bounce off but its lost most its energy. Lets face it, the 338 round is a great round that can make it to 2 miles BUT do you think it can make it 2 miles with half its energy. Maybe, but my car is full of rock chips, and I've lived.
Besides that though, the numbers STILL stay the same. The chances of a ricochet having the exact elevation and windage on an object TWO MILES away, is EXTREMELY small, and not something to worry about any more than the rifle blowing up in your hands while shooting. Ricochets don't have any different intrinsic advantage of hitting something. They have just as small a chance to hit something that far away as him just randomly lobbing it, actually a smaller chance of doing damage actually because of the decreased energy.Don't forget the object we are talking about isn't the great wall of china here, it has a finite and small(Relative to 2 miles) length and height. So for the richocet to have hit the ground/object at the exact point and angle is small. Lets not forget about the HILL it needs to fly over, which again severly reduces the amount of possible combinations of paths that can happen for the bullet to hit the car while still making it over the hill.
If he was shooting a machine gun and putting 100's of rounds down the field a minute for extended periods of time. Your right, I would call him an idiot. Not even because the chances are high he would hit something, but at that point the chances become large enough to even be comprehendable, so my personal opinion would be that he should go somewhere else.