stagpanther
New member
Would have been nice if he had referred to "velocity of plane" as indicated airspeed (adjusted for pressure/density) and relative wind as "the wind speed the aircraft experiences."
Would have been nice if he had referred to "velocity of plane" as indicated airspeed (adjusted for pressure/density) and relative wind as "the wind speed the aircraft experiences."
It's a little tricky to use a plane as an analog to a bullet since a plane is powered and guided while a bullet is an unguided projectile and is neither creating its own velocity via some sort of propulsion mechanism nor steering itself via some sort of guidance system.I will go with what Sierra Engineers and the Laws of Aerodynamics relate.
https://youtu.be/FIPhwp-V2RQ
Correct. That's what I said.With our bullet, we never achieve that equilibrium...
??? It doesn't seem like you are disagreeing with what I said. Or rather, I guess it does SEEM like you are but the comment about never achieving equilibrium agrees perfectly with my comment.You are free to disagree .
That is correct. It is gradually acquiring the sideways velocity (relative to the target) but so gradually that it will never actually get there before it hits the target (or the ground). In fact, it will never get anywhere close to it.If took snapshots of the bullet and could measure the forces then at each snapshot for those conditions, the bullet would be adopting the "Velocity of the Bullet Relative to the Wind" that moves it as part of that air mass under those conditions.
It's a little tricky to use a plane
We have gone through this, haven't we?
Except that an aircraft can adjust airspeed and use control surfaces to compensate for drift in the airmass to arrive at ground-based stationary target, no?No, it is the exact same physical sciences as any other object traveling thru the air.
Except that an aircraft can adjust airspeed and use control surfaces to compensate for drift in the airmass to arrive at ground-based stationary target, no?
With our bullet, we never achieve that equilibrium. It's not self powered and leaves the barrel with a finite amount of energy therefore it is never in steady state flight. It is constantly changing including its orientation over the flight path. If took snapshots of the bullet and could measure the forces then at each snapshot for those conditions, the bullet would be adopting the "Velocity of the Bullet Relative to the Wind" that moves it as part of that air mass under those conditions.
The physics of aerodynamics does not change, it's just buried in secondary frame of reference as we only really care about the bullet in reference to the ground because our target is on the ground, not the air. It is buried in constantly changing conditions of flight due to the fact our bullet is never in steady state flight.
I didn't say or imply that they did. I think I made it fairly clear that the use of control surfaces and airspeed adjustment allows an aircraft to compensate for the drift in the airmass in order to arrive "on target" for a ground-base reference target. I don't think that conflicts with anything you have argued as far as I can tell.Control surfaces and Power application do not change the physics or allow an airplane to alter the laws of physical science.
I think I made it fairly clear that the use of control surfaces and airspeed adjustment allows an aircraft to compensate for the drift in the airmass in order to arrive "on target" for a ground-base reference target.
I don't think that conflicts with anything you have argued as far as I can tell.
Just from the purely intuitive sense (from years of archery experience and with bullets) I suspect you can't make an apples to apples application of physics of bullet flight to that of arrows--but I look forward to your explanation.
As to the precession thing, I'm not very skilled with physics and readily admit ignorance, but I do know a little about aircraft design. I looked at some of the diagrams and explanations for the forces of precession that affect a bullet's flight and immediately encountered the "given" that there is a pressure/lift differential that causes a pitch up or down of the nose of the bullet. I take this to mean that a bullet design can actually climb--or dive--as a result of a change in its angle of attack to the relative wind. Classic wing design theory holds that this pressure differential that results in lift is a result of what is often equated to the Bernoulli effect; because of the camber in the leading edge of a wing and the distance the relative wind travels over the chord of the wing to the trailing edge, it has further to go over the top surface than the bottom surface and that is that primary mechanism for creating lift (there are some aerodynamic physicists who disagree with this, imagine that ). Bullets obviously do not have a variable camber to create pressure differential and hence climb or dive. Where I do see the similarities between a bullet and an aircraft is the effect of parasitic drag which affects the flow of the relative wind over the surfaces that affect the stability in flight. You can easily see that in videos of vortices streaming off of aircraft's wings. People often think that stall of an aircraft is a function of the airspeed--it is not, it is a function of the angle of attack for which there is an airspeed at which that stall happens.
Fire away!
whereas the other is complicated spin stabilized.
center of pressure to be behind its center of mass
I suspect you can't make an apples to apples application of physics of bullet flight to that of arrows
stagpanther said:I looked at some of the diagrams and explanations for the forces of precession that affect a bullet's flight and immediately encountered the "given" that there is a pressure/lift differential that causes a pitch up or down of the nose of the bullet.
The headwind experienced by a bullet is always tangent to the trajectory arc,
Yes. It's messy and irregular. When the bullet clears the muzzle, the gas behind it in the barrel, being lighter than the bullet, accelerates and blows past the bullet. So, the bullet actually has a tailwind for a brief period between interior and exterior ballistic effects called transitional or intermediate ballistic period. That tailwind increases the bullet's forward velocity without increasing its spin (because it is no longer constrained by the bore and rifling). The effect on velocity is commonly on the order of three percent or so of the peak bullet velocity. During the transitional period, and especially in the first few calibers of travel out of the barrel (eleven calibers were measured by the military for artillery), if there was any flaw in the muzzle crown's axial symmetry or if the bullet was at all tilted in the bore, the muzzle blast will play unevenly off its base, and this contributes significantly to initial yaw and to lateral drift. But even if a bullet has no initial yaw coming out of the muzzle, as soon as it is clear of the bore, gravity starts pulling it down, and unless it is fired straight up, that starts to pull it into the trajectory arc. The headwind experienced by a bullet is always tangent to the trajectory arc, so as that arc turns down, that headwind starts to angle up, and that puts a vertical overturning drag on the bullet because its gyroscopic stiffness tries to keep it on the original bore line. As a result, the headwind itself becomes the source of an upward overturning force that initiates coning motion.
Note that there is also a lift on the bullet angled off the tangent line of the trajectory that moves the whole bullet and doesn't just act to overturn it. As precession causes coning to set in, the direction of that "lift" goes around the clock, causing the bullet's center of mass to travel in a spiral. Each time coning goes around the clock it pushes the bullet back where it came from, so this helix simply circles the trajectory path. I calculated it for a 30-caliber match bullet once long ago, assuming about one moa of yaw, and it worked out to be something like 0.02" in diameter, IIRC. I've forgotten the rate of twist and the bullet weight, but it's a small orbit that shrinks as a properly stabilized bullet goes down range because the coning radius spirals inward on such a bullet. In any event, you have a couple of cyclical motions here, such as the coning and the helical corkscrewing. The term epicyclic means to have multiple cycles at once, as when the moon orbits the earth, but the earth also drags it along an orbit around the sun at the same time, not to mention the whole galaxy turning, so the moon's motion is epicyclic, and so is a bullet's.
When I first started shooting Service Rifle matches back in the '80s, I noticed that when the sky was clear on Viale range, and you stood at the 600-yard line watching guns shooting at the slight upward angle that requires, you could see the mirage of the bullet wake when a rifle fired, and some were pretty straight, but some were a very pronounced helix, indicating bullets with less or more initial yaw, and the same gun might fire one and then the other or anything in between. This causes a small difference in ballistic coefficient from shot-to-shot, of course, but not nearly enough to spoil a good score.
tangolima said:The transitional ballistic period, the moment the bullet exits the muzzle, is a critical moment. The stabilization mechanism hasn't been fully established.
tangolima said:Along this thought, do you think a muzzle device of enough length may do good by shielding the bullet from cross wind?
Damn! I thought I was on to something that would work. Nothing new under the sun. I'm getting a plain thread protector then.Yes. Boattails are sensitive to uneven or asymmetric wind deflecting of the slope of the boattail, tending to impart slow drift away from the intended trajectory in the direction opposite the gas deflection. The final stabilization mechanism in the relative wind that David defined can't begin until the bullet has exited the temporary blast sphere of accelerated gases, as we've all seen in Schlieren shadowgraphs of a firing rifle. Until that moment, the bullet has no slowing drag, and any hint of starting gyroscopic stabilization in that short time period would be a response to the tailwind. Since the twist direction for response to the tailwind is from the front of the bullet, that precession response will be backward from the precession off-axis drag on the nose will induce later. So if it made any significant attempt to stabilize in that short transitional period, it would have to be undone after it cleared the blast sphere.
That muzzle blast sphere is already a shield for a foot or two. If you install a muzzle brake, though, it will reduce that sphere's size. The sphere is comprised of gasses that have exponential deceleration as they expand, which gives them more and more area of atmosphere to lose kinetic energy against. It's not quite a perfect sphere, but close enough that its force will be close to obeying the inverse square law that the strength gravity and light and magnetism from an isotropic source do. In other words, double in size and have four times the deceleration, so this stuff slows down quickly.
This suggests a gun with a muzzle brake will not only lose the last 3% of acceleration from muzzle blast, but the bullet will experience wind a foot or two sooner.
As far as seriously affecting wind, Harold Vaughn got his gun club to let him install 100 yards of sewer pipe to give them a zero wind firing point. Doing that for longer ranges is limited by the height of the trajectory, as the sewer pipe gets pretty costly when it's ten feet wide. But stopping the wind takes that sort of effort.