Lindsay W via luv-talk wrote:
If one has a GOOD rifle (solidly and evenly built, manually operated front locking bolt etc, NOT any automatic weapons) one will have little difficulty in landing successive shots in a 1 cm square at 100 metres BUT both the rifle AND the shooter him/her self needs to be WELL supported.
Ah, apologies, I was working from the example numbers in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcminute article. I see much smaller numbers on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M24_Sniper_Weapon_System#Specifications
If some one is shooting at you it would be quite safe to say one would NOT be able to hold a bead on someone for ANY length of time. That's why automatic weapons were invented, they are designed to spray the landscape with fast flying solid objects.
Dr. Gatling wrote that he created [the Gatling gun] to reduce the size of armies and so reduce the number of deaths by combat and disease, and to show how futile war is.^[7] … It was not a true automatic weapon. The Maxim gun, invented and patented in 1883, was the first true fully automatic weapon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatling More a publicity stunt than a serious military contribution, in view of the main financier of the expedition, William Mackinnon, "merely exhibiting" the gun was likely to "prove a great peace-preserver".^[6] … It has been called "the weapon most associated with the British imperial conquest",^[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxim_gun I guess you are thinking of suppressing fire doctrine by an integrated squad automatic rifleman, which is still aimed and is still fired in bursts of 5 to 8 rounds, in the last FM I read (to conserve ammo, and maximize time between barrel changes). IIRC the M240 requires a barrel change every 2 to 5 minutes depending on the rate of fire, and the operators between them only carry 2 spare barrels (and you can't safely swap barrels between M240s without a trip to the armourer). That's for air-cooled systems; automatic rifles that are not man-portable can use water cooling (water is heavy!) which can significantly lengthen time between barrel changes. Some man-portable automatic rifles are also capable of indirect fire, but I think this is rarely used in practice. Oh, I've been assuming you mean "automatic" in the sense of "fully automatic" rather than "semi-automatic" (self-loading).
the US army sniper rifle is a nice weapon using standard 1/2inch ammunition accurate out to well over 1000 metres.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_equipment_of_the_United_States_Army#Sm... They field several sniper rifles (inc. "designated marksman" rifles, which is the anglicized term for soviet-style integrated sniper doctrine). I guess you're referring to the .50 BMG cartridge (originally for the M2 Browning, emphatically NOT a sniper rifle), which would therefore be the Barrett M82 (a.k.a. M107). AFAIK its main job is to kill engine blocks, not people. Also note that the above page is for the US Army specifically, not the US armed forces in general. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equipment_of_the_US_Navy#Small_Arms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weapons_of_the_United_States_Marine_Co... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_individual_weapons_of_the_U.S._Armed_F... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_individual_weapons_of_the_U.S._Armed_F... Can't find one for the USAF.