How does a Colt 'Navy' work?

[shadowdragon]

ahh... you're right..
forgot about ballistics gel......


so lesseeee.... gavitic or electro launch rail,
sterioscopic targeting system at arm ends,
secondary solid fuel rocket propulsion,
terminal guidance to 2km,
500 gram explosive warhead.....

could be fun

as far as accuracy goes- nothing is inherently accurate or inaccurate as far as I am concerned, excepting if it is unpredictably innacurate. bows and x-bows are not "terribly innacurate" once you understand their manners. thats what practice is for...

Armor Piercing arrows (also known as pile arrows) and armor defeating quarrels look nothing alike. the "traditional" quarrel had a square head approx. 1/2" accross, concave at the tip, with the resulting 4 edges honed a bit to give a mild edge.
there is ALOT of power generated by the stave, and it all goes into a nearly 1/2 pound quarrel (short and fat they were) It will literally punch through plate armor. that is one of the reasons it was banned by so many popes for so many years. "modern" x-bows are quite degenerate relatives of a true arbalest...
barbaric things......

 

[Pickles]

Originally posted by Uncle Bob:
Clay is a bad example (so is soap) because it is inelastic and any distortion or displacement is exaggerrated and preserved.

Looks cool, though.

 

[Todg]

Originally posted by shadowdragon:
as far as accuracy goes- nothing is inherently accurate or inaccurate as far as I am concerned, excepting if it is unpredictably innacurate. bows and x-bows are not "terribly innacurate" once you understand their manners. thats what practice is for...

You're right in a send. What most people understand as accuracy is actually precision - the ability to repeatably hit a target. Most firearms have a precision of less than 5 Minutes of angle (MOA) that is almost all the shots from a firearm fired from a fixture will go into slightly more than 5 inches at 100 yards. Most guns do much better - in the 2 to 3 MOA range. No bow ever made comes anywhere close. The best rifles can shoot groups that are less than 1/4 MOA all day long - that is place all there shots into a 0.25 inche center-to-center spread.

Here's an example of a 10 shot group fired at a target 100 yards away. The squares indicate 1 inch

Armor Piercing arrows (also known as pile arrows) and armor defeating quarrels look nothing alike. the "traditional" quarrel had a square head approx. 1/2" accross, concave at the tip, with the resulting 4 edges honed a bit to give a mild edge.
there is ALOT of power generated by the stave, and it all goes into a nearly 1/2 pound quarrel (short and fat they were) It will literally punch through plate armor. that is one of the reasons it was banned by so many popes for so many years. "modern" x-bows are quite degenerate relatives of a true arbalest...
barbaric things......

The efficacy of armor piercing arrows has been called into question. There have been several modern tests that show that armor piercing arrows aren't nearly as effective as once believed.

 

[Anthony]

Of course, precision is mostly irrelevant in modern combat; under combat conditions, the biggest factor in whether a gun hits is the shooter's ability to point the gun in the right direction in the first place. At a typical infantry engagement range of 100 meters, a precision of 10 MOA has a better than 90% chance of hitting a human in the torso, assuming it's actually pointed at the target. In that same distance, a rifle bullet will drop by 5-7 cm, so you don't even need to worry about that (a pistol bullet will drop by enough to possibly matter. So will a crossbow bolt).

As accuracy at 100 meters is well under 90%, this shows that most gunfire is simply pointed in the wrong direction, and making the gun more precise isn't going to help much.

The big disadvantage of the crossbow bolt is that it's fairly slow. If you have a target moving at 5 meters/second at 100 meters, with a rifle bullet at 900m/s you need to lead the target by 55 cm. With a crossbow bolt at 100 m/s you need to lead by 5 meters. With a laser you need to lead the target by 1.6 micrometers (i.e. target motion can be ignored).

 

[Todg]

Thta's where the gauss rifle will have a real advantage. Essentially no drop or lead at typical combat ranges. And the laser rifle will make a great sniper weapon for the same reasons.