User talk:The Yowser

External ballistics and bullet drop

You said "...but I do know that this article doesn't tell me what I wanted to know." So what did you want to know? I'm not sure it's practical to include a general purpose bullet drop table (the Speer handloading manual I have has pages and pages of G1 model charts) but if you wanted to see, say, drop charts for a selection of popular calibers, that would be pretty easy to put together. Let me know what you want, and I'll see what I can do about adding it to the article. scot (talk) 14:25, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Well, that is a rather specialized question. How about I work through the answer here, and then we can decide what relevant information can go into the external ballistics article?

First, the basics of air resistance. A ballistic object, that is one moving under only its own inertia, is "powered" by its mass. Take two objects, one twice the mass of the other; the one that is twice as massive will have twice kinetic the energy at any given velocity. This is why bullets are typically made out of lead, because it's cheap and dense, letting you pack more energy into a bullet of a given size. Anti-tank rounds go even denser, with materials like depleted uranium and tungsten, with nearly twice the density of lead, letting them carry even more energy for a given size and shape.

To move through the air, or for that matter any fluid (and at high enough impact speeds, even tank armor splashes like a fluid), the projectile must push the fluid out of the way, and this takes energy. If you take two objects of equal mass and velocity, one a sphere of radius 10 and one a long, thin cylinder of radius 1, they will have the same kinetic energy. However, the sphere will have to push much more fluid out of the way to traverse the fluid; 100 times as much, since it has 100 times as much frontal surface area. This is where sectional density comes in; it's the ratio of mass to frontal surface area, and when penetration is desired, a greater sectional density is good. When penetration is to be limited, then a lower sectional density is good--this is why expanding bullets exist, to greatly increase their frontal surface area upon impact and limit penetration by displacing more fluid. Also note that to move at twice the velocity, twice as much fluid per unit time must be moved.

Not only does the projectile have to move the air, but it has to move it quickly enough to let the projectile pass through. Compare two projectiles of equal mass, velocity, and frontal surface; one with a flat face, the other with a long, slender taper. The flat projectile will have to accelerate the fluid nearly instantly from rest to the projectile's velocity, pushing it forward and outwards. The tapered projectile will gradually accelerate the fluid slightly forward but mostly to the sides, accelerating it far more gradually. Since f=ma, the force required to accelerate the air quickly is far greater than the force required to accelerate it gradually. Again, double the projectile velocity, and you double the fluid acceleration required. The shape of the back also has some impact, as the low pressure behind the projectile pulls fluid along behind it (at least in the air) and this also takes energy; this is why boat-tailed bullets provide lower drag than flat based bullets, by reducing the low pressure void and the resulting fluid mass it moves. Combine the shape with the sectional density, and you get a single factor called a "ballistic coefficient", which describes how well a ballistic object moves through a fluid compared to a standardized object. A high ballistic coefficient means less velocity loss; increasing the sectional density or streamlining the shape gives you a higher BC, decreasing the sectional density or blunting the shape gives you a lower BC. BCs are not constant across all velocities, but rather change slightly, but usually they are averaged across the expected velocity range and presented as a single value. One note of interest is that when you scale a projectile diameter up by a factor of 2, holding shape and material density constant, the frontal surface goes up by a factor of 4, and the volume and thus mass by a factor of 8, which yields an overall BC increase of 2.

Now combine the quantity of air to move with the acceleration required, and you get an air resistance that is proportional to the velocity squared; the exact exponent is not v^2, but the v^2 or v^3 curves are both close enough to match experimental results with an appropriate scaling factor.

Once you get into the supersonic realm, things change a bit, but not too greatly. Since you're now trying to accelerate the fluid particles faster than their average molecular velocity (that's what the speed of sound is based on) they tend to build up in front of the projectile, and require more force to accelerate. That doesn't change the essential exponential nature of the curve, but it does change the scaling factor you use to fit the a given exponential curve to the projectile path. I wrote a simple ballistic matching program that did a curve fit to the ballistic charts listed in my reloading manual; I used two different "fudge factors" to make my exponential curves fit the curves given by the charts, based on whether the projectile was subsonic or supersonic, and I got a very good match to the charts with this simple program. I tried v^2 and v^3, and ended up settling on v^3 as giving me the best fit over the extent of the data I was fitting to.

Now for the Me 163 versus the 30mm shell (the article states it was a low velocity, 30mm MK 108 cannon). I'm assuming a ballistic coefficient of 1.0; the G1 drag model is based on a 1 inch bullet, and the 30mm shell is going to suffer a bit since it's less dense, being full of explosive or incendiary mix. The glider, under power, will do about 600 mph, which is 880 f/s, and that gets added to the 1770 f/s of the cannon shell. Assuming a constant speed of 600 mph for the Me 163, it's going to catch up with the shell after about 23 seconds, nearly 4 miles past the firing point; the shell have slowed to about 500 f/s forwards, also 500 f/s downwards, and will have dropped over 7000 feet. Note that the plane would need to immediately vector downwards to reach the point where the bullet will be, or aim slightly upwards, and that's going to mean it travels more than the 4 miles quoted. I would need to do some iterative calculations to figure out where the interception point would have to be (probably add another half mile or so), but the results from this simulation show that the bullet is going to be moving at a much steeper angle than the plane when the paths cross, and that's going to make the odds of an impact astronomical. scot (talk) 17:42, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Live Steam gauges

You can't have everything in one article, see Rail_transport_modelling_scales, this is in the "See Also" section in the Live Steam article... ;)

Speedy deletion nomination of Tang Sao Dao

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What's going on? I can't see anything about what I put on line to make it qualify for speedy deletion. It was a stub but I included a reference to a page that verified all the information. The Yowser (talk) 13:33, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

Simply verifying the existence of a subject is not sufficient. Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. Subjects must be demonstrated to be notable by indicating they have received significant coverage in independent sources. I hope this clears up your confusion. WikiDan61^ChatMe!_ReadMe!! 16:09, 27 August 2010 (UTC)

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Nomination of Obfuscation on Wikipedia for deletion

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Please don't put personal reflections in article space. --Cameron Scott (talk) 09:33, 7 September 2011 (UTC)

It needs an admin to move it into your personal space - let me see what I can do. --Cameron Scott (talk) 09:37, 7 September 2011 (UTC)

The article text is now at User:The Yowser/Obfuscation on Wikipedia. The mainspace article has been deleted by move without redirect. - Smerdis of Tlön - killing the human spirit since 2003! 14:47, 7 September 2011 (UTC)

Write Once Read Many

ROM was already mentioned at the end of this article. It is only tangentially related to WORM, as the end-user can't write it even once. Also, ROM is still "ubiquitous" in computers; it provides the code that reads in the operating system, though you're right that originally it sometimes contained the complete operating system. I'll move your paragraph to the end of the article and truncate it. I think that how ROM is programmed belongs in its own article. Spike-from-NH (talk) 20:06, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

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Speedy deletion nomination of Chelyabinsk Meteor shower

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