Am I the only one who find this strange? Even with local weather information, there's a lot of uncertainty on wind speed and direction, humidity, etc etc. Does the Coriolis effect actually matter or is it negligible?
My understanding is that the Coriolis Effect only comes into play at very long ranges. That being said snipers nowadays are more and more using heavy caliber (generally .50BMG) rounds and taking their shots at much longer distances than in previous times.
As an example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Furlong Rob Furlong made a shot against a target that was 2,430 meters away. At that range the bullet's flight time was just under 3 seconds! At that sort of range pretty much anything can affect the bullet enough to deflect it off target...
"As an ex British markman/sharpeshooter, we are trained to take everything into account, the coriolis effect is taught but very rarely acted upon, your generally close enough to see someones face when taking a shot. The Barret M95 has an incredible range, and when your talking anything over 1 click, wind, humidity, spin are all more important than the coriolis effect, but when it comes to taking a shot you do not want to miss, a miss can get you killed, you keep your mind on all variables."
[Found here: http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/569190]
Yes, there's some uncertainty, but I'd assume snipers are used to estimating or measuring these values pretty well.
Let's face it: without the numbers, we're talking plain nonsense.
In what sense? Would you care to elaborate on that?
Would have love to have more details of other consumer grade products they buy.
