My information comes from my own experience with fire arms, I regard any self loading rifle as "automatic". My own esperience is of course limited but I have fired a number of .243 calibre rifles, a number of .270's including a self loader, a 400 nitro express, .458 Bruno Magnum, a .457 or .458 Weatherby Magum and I have seen a M107 being fired. Note: One has to be EXTREMELY carefull with these latter 2 weapons as they will put a bullet completely intact through a 70cm hardwood tree even at 200 metres. The problem with getting fire arms REALLY accurate (all bullets landing in 1 cm square at 100metres) is that the mechanism CANNOT be allowed to distort unevenly. In high powered weapons on firing the chamber pressure is so high that it will cause the barrel to "balloon" slightly and if the bolt or the barrel is even slightly unevenly made, it will cause the barrel to deflect off straight. For this reason a group from a weapon such as the M107 it would be good going to land 5 shots in a 5cm circle. A problem with self loading (semi automatic) weapons is its very difficult to build them SIMPLE ,RELIABLE AND make the weapon accurate. With something like the M107 or the Weatherby one would have a reasonably good chance of killing a person at 1000 metres even if they were behind 20mm armour plate., hence the M107's use as a sniper rifle. To achieve this though you DO have take EXTREME care with the aimimg of the weapon. Lindsay ----- Original message ----- From: "Trent W. Buck" <trentbuck@gmail.com> To: Lindsay W <lindz_wolf@fastmail.com> Cc: luv-talk@luv.asn.au Subject: Re: [luv-talk] How many Lumens can blind you? Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2018 11:09:38 +1000 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.