Even children are taught to not throw rocks when people are around. It’s common sense you do not shoot a firearm up in the air because this can kill anyone within at least a mile away. There are people out there unless you are in the desert. This has happened more often than you might know. You could have been the victim as well.

Saying Diego Duran was in the wrong place at the wrong time is really something I don’t get. It’s like you are saying the shooter was ok, it’s the boy who was in the way? I think the shooter was in the wrong place at the wrong time. There is no good place or time for this act of stupidity and selfishness. What an extraordinary lack of common sense!

F: A bullet going zero speed can’t accelerate beyond terminal velocity and takes a certain amount of time to do so. A bullet “dropped” with, say, 10% terminal velocity will not accelratre to 110% of terminal velocity and then slow down … it simply reaches terminal velocity sooner. Right?

False. Ish. If the 10% is in the vertical direction, you are correct. If not, we need to consider the vertical and horizontal vector components independently. (Consider- a bullet “dropped” out of a gun at many times terminal velocity in the lateral direction still accelerates downward due to gravity.) Terminal velocity is the vertical speed at which the net force of gravity and air resistance along the vertical axis is 0. This condition does not cause the bullet to lose or gain horizontal momentum.

For a given bullet fired from a given rifle, the angle at which velocity at apogee is terminal velocity or slower is the angle at which one is “shooting a bullet into the air” instead of “shooting the bullet at an unknown distant target”

(with that grey area in between we can ignore for now)

What I question is that this angle is exactly 90 degrees. That’s a gut feeling, but a strong one!

Aside from that I think we have a LOT of problems with terminal velocity. I don’t see any cited sources that do anything other than citing other sources, thumsucks, or poorly documented emperical tests done so long ago I don’t see how they apply in that bullets have changed so much.

Which brings up a whole bunch of questions. Aren’t some bullets designed to flatten out on firing, others not? Rifle bullets spin in a way to even flight. Does that influence the configuration of a falling bullet? TV is a function of density, size, shape, attitude, and rotation. All these things can vary a LOT from bullet to bullet, firing to firing.

The idea that TV can be between 200 and 500 mph could be reasonable (those are the cited numbers) but given that the emperical and theoretical basis for this is all over the place, I don’t think this is a range of possibilities as much as it is a range of guesses.

The angle at which the bullet will ‘only’ be at terminal velocity depends on how much of the initial ballistic energy needs to be lost for you to consider it negligible. The velocity imparted to the bullet along the lateral direction (rusty physics- should be the dot product of [sine of the angle from the vertical]and [magnitude of muzzle velocity]?) is not reduced by gravity and only faces air resistance. If I’m doing it right (I’m probably not), around 5-6 degrees off the vertical leaves you with 10% of the original muzzle velocity, assuming negligible air (a bad assumption in a terminal velocity problem). Then you make a right triangle with that number as the lateral edge and the terminal velocity as the vertical edge and solve to get your final velocity. The central question is what to reasonably call ‘small’ compared to terminal velocity.

I’ve reared my kids and hundreds of animals here over the years. Despite the random bullet hole mentioned, I believe they’re a lot safer, on their behalf, than I would if I had stayed in the US.

Why do you think people are wearing goggles and leather hats in all those old photographs!?!? Steampunk wasn’t just a fashion statement!

He said they often saw significant scalp wounds from falling bullets, some skull fractures and concussion, and the occasional death.

The wounds are different from falling as opposed to ‘trajectory’ bullets, mainly because of the loss of spin, so they could tell them apart.

Now that I believe.

A bullet falling at terminal velocity is probably not going to kill you, but it is probably going to fuck you up. And it just might kill you.

Think about getting punched really hard in the head, hard enough to give you a concussion. You probably won’t die — you just might, but probably not — but you’ll definitely land in the hospital.