War Man wrote:
I don't plan on being a sniper as you have to have a shitload of patience which I don't have.
-Sh1fty- wrote:
Not to mention you need to know better physics than somebody working at NASA
Trotskygrad wrote:
you need to calculate crap faster than the people at NASA, that's fo sho. Cause the pplz at NASA have supercomputers. Or accurately estimate better.
Patience is the preferred attribute. For one of the snipers I know, he is
not a patient man - but he is stubborn, grimly determined, and stoic.
(Think Hugo Stiglitz, from
Inglorious Basterds) and that grim, quiet, violence-on-tap serves as a stand-in for patience.
Smart, knowledgeable, intuitive, eagle-eyed - are terms I'd use to describe the three snipers I know.
None of them have taken any physics or math past high school, however.
Their knowledge of exterior ballistics is superb, but it is a field/practical knowledge rather than a mathematical/physics based knowledge.
They are
not NASA Scientists, they are field soldiers. Experience, memory, training, and attention to detail are their primary tools.
They don't do complex calculus equations in their head while shooting - they have someone else do that, write down all the useful answers, and memorize the table of answers. (trajectory tables, wind drift @ ranges, altitude corrections, sine angle corrections).
They could tell you how to read the wind by feel, or by sight.. They could tell you a few short algebra equations to mentally calculate certain important variables.. They could tell you how to be so damn sneaky in the woods that you surprise woodland creatures at touching range.. But their knowledge of interior ballistics is rather shallow. To them, interior ballistics is summed up with
"chamber a military issue match round, get proper positioning, and pull the trigger careful-like"There are the Geek Ballisticians (the scientists of shooting), then there are the Snipers (the practical applications guys) - very rarely do you meet someone that is both.
Last edited by rdx-fx (2010-05-10 12:37:41)