I recently picked up the RAMS .50 and love it. But I found my aim was off quite a bit so I did some completely un-scientific testing. I started shooting at walls using walls that had horizontal lines. I would put my crosshair on the line, hold my breath and fire then see where the bullet hole ended up. Every shot resulted with a bullet hold above the line. Not some of the shots...every one. I went through all 25 shots. It wasn't above the line by a lot but enough for me to determine that I had some bullet rise before gravity kicked in. In practical use I've found that aiming at the top or just above an enemy head with this gun results in a miss. But If I aim low on the head or in a couple cases on their neck, I get the head shot. Has anyone else noticed this? Is it a result of the guns 'accuracy'? Could I be too close to the target (I'm definitely not at close range) for example shooting guys inside the middle of an Amp station from rocks outside of the outer wall?
The snipers tend to be zero'd for around 200m. (so i've heard) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rifleman's_rule
Guns are zeroed at some range, my very quick and dirty testing indicates its around 150m, so yeah there is a bit of bullet rise on sniper rifles. As you noticed, if you shoot down you need to aim lower than normal for the range, if you shoot up you need to aim higher. Exactly how much depends on angle and the bullet speed of the weapon you are using. Explanation given in the riflemans rule wikipedia article is good.
You are absolutely right in your observation. However, what you are noticing is modeling of real world bullet flight trajectories. When you fire a bullet from a rifle in real life, the bullet does actually rise a bit, then start falling due to gravity. I believe it is called parabolic flight. In the real world, the way you offset this is to 'zero' your sight. That means that you adjust your scope so that at X meters, the bullet hits the target dead center. This scope adjustment accounts for the rise and then fall of the bullet. In PS2, we don't officially know what the 'zero' distance is, thought 150 to 200 meters seems about right. So, at ranges closer than that, you need to aim lower. I target the neck, just below the jaw line. At close to 150-200, aim dead center. Farther out, you have to aim higher to account for the bullet drop. This, of course, only accounts for bullets fired at a target on the same level as you. If you are firing up hill or down hill, it changes a bit. Hope this helps.
Thanks for the confirmation. I guess it's just much more pronounced on this gun versus my previous bolt action. Happy Head Hunting!
What force is acting upon the bullet to make it rise? It doesn't rise, it's just that the sight is already zeroed for a further distance than 0. Thus you are technically aiming upward at distance 0. The bullet would travel in a perfectly straight line from the barrel of the gun except for gravity, which pulls the bullet downward. As a side note the way gravity or "bullet drop" is handled in this game is completely inconsistent. While infantry firearms have the same bullet drop, rockets and shells from vehicles or aircraft do not. Also, Vanu weapons do not have bullet drop (other than bolt actions and MBT main cannons), which is absurd because the entire basis of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity is that light is affected by gravity. The particle beams or photons that make up Vanu projectiles should be affected by gravity the same as any other projectiles. To give Vanu the appearance of having relatively no bullet drop the projectile velocities should simply be very high instead. That would actually add some uniqueness to the different factions' weapons in the game, as well.
vanu projectiles are plasma and have less mass than their TR and nc counterparts, thus are less effected by gravity, so much so that for the average firefight they gravity appears to have no effect at all
would be nice if we could zero the sniper files to a range, like normal rifles are able to if you drop a stone which weighs 5kg, and one that weighs 200kg, which one hits the ground first?
Your observation is correct. The bullet follows real life ballistics. It travels in an arc whose highest point raises above your crosshair. Then it descends until its trajectory intersects the center of the crosshair. This point is called zero. Guns are calibrated to have their zero point at a certain range, they are "zeroed in to 200m" for example. After zero the bullet continues to descend below the crosshair. This is particularly noticable on the RAMS/Longshot/Parallax, presumably because they are zeroed into a much longer range than the other sniper rifles. Proof:
if you want to be technical, the 200KG one does, but it does so by such a small margin that for all practical purposes, and for most timing instruments they arrive at the same time gravitational force is F = Gm1m2/r2 M1 is constant, the mass of the planet M2 is the mass of the projectile G is the gravitational constant and R is the distance from the center of the planet. the diferences are small, due mainly to the fact that the mass of earth is something on the the order of 6E24 kg. you could easily lose the difference as a rounding error due to significant digits... but mathematically, with all other factors being equal, it's trivial to prove that a difference exists. since a ball of superheated plasma is going to have a near infinitesimal mass compared to that of a bullet, they are going to experience a different acceleration due to gravity. everything does. it just so happens that in daily life, the mass differential isn't great enough to be accounted for, and wind resistance ends up playing a far, far greater role. this of couse isn't taking into account any additional effects a plasma projectile may experience such as lift forces the plasma experiences due to it's temperature/density, or any additional +/- lift effects created by the magnetic bottling the weapon uses to create the projectile.
actually i just wanted to point out that the weigh of a bullet is not at all important for bullet drop, unless they have no mass at all or have a relatively high volume allowing air friction to be really high however, seeing the big projectiles of plasma from a magrider drop like a normal grenade and at the same time having almost zero bullet drop for vanu snipers makes me think how the devs actually think plasma works
Game designers mix fantasy with physics: Lasers fire slow moving "bolts", plasma is some vague term for glowing-hot "liquid" with magical properties, particle accelerators launch projectiles at visible speeds, gauss weapons have an "electric" muzzle flash.
Every object accelerates at the same speed in vacuum towards the earth, thanks to Newton aka F = m*a which relates force to acceleration. To put that into your equation to calculate the gravitational force: F = m2*a = G*m2*m1/r² after eliminating m2 (the mass of our projectile) and filling in G, m2 and r this simplifies to: a = G*m1/r² = g = 9.80m/s² +- 0.02 (depending on your latitude) And as speed caused by gravity is the integral of the gravitational acceleration over time there is no mass dependency in there (v(t) = t*g + v0). Only reason there is a difference in bullet drop with various calibers is air friction. Sorry, just had to get that physics right.
but we cannot just eliminate m2. a bullet is going to be exponentially heavier then an equal volume of plasma since one is a slug of metal, and the other is essentially superheated gas
This is the basic gist of what the OP is experiencing. And yeah, the newer bolt actions have a higher bullet velocity thus they are able to travel farther (basically having a longer arc from muzzle to the ground based on angle of fire) so they would almost have to be zeroed in at a longer distance.
Since you understand how this works, I thought I'd give you a tip on how to practice with the sniper rifle. What I like to do with the different rifles (I have a couple diff sniper rifles on my infi) is find a good spot where I'm concealed and place a personal waypoint approximately where my enemy are running around. This tells me the range. I can then use this range indicator to kind of mentally calculate the bullet rise and drop. One thing I have noticed from these experiments is that distance traveled not only affects the bullets trajectory, but also it's final damage output. If I headshot someone at 200m for example, I'll kill them, while at 250m - 350m it's going to be more like a body shot. I don't know the values 100% as I have no way to calculate damage properly, but it's a safe bet if you're in that 200m range you're really well off, but around 300m your effectiveness drops off quite a bit. Hope this helps.
