I just saw the most amazing bit of detail...

[G B Scurlock]

I was watching a sniper with his 50mm rifle firing at a Syrian rifleman behind a wall at about 250 yards i suppose. I was enjoying the shell casing ejecting after each shot. I then went down to the target Syrian to see what was happening at that end. I was up close and using some magnefication. Just then the Syrian was hit by a snipers shot and I actually saw some "material", for lack of a better word ,fly off of his body as the 50mm bullet hit home. Wow. It was gross and cool at the same time!

[ChrisND]

The kick on that rifle must be one nasty sum'b*tch.

[Apocal]

"sniper with his 50mm rifle"

MOTHER OF GOD!

[Topo]

!!!isn't a sniper, it's a gunner!!!

[SgtMuhammed]

The real killer is the 200mm version of the M203. You need some pretty hefty Weaver Rails for that one.

[Elmar Bijlsma]

Ofcourse, GBS meant .50 or 12.7mm rifle, in case he was unaware of his error and the cause of hilarity. Don't feel bad. Plenty of discovery channel translators mention planes with 20cm cannon, thus giving them the armament of a heavy cruiser.

[SgtMuhammed]

Don't get me started on those guys.

[Elmar Bijlsma]

Funniest/worst was a description of the P-47 which apparently is armed with eight 50cm cannon, giving it sufficient armament to duke it out with the Yamato class battleships. It's amazing the war lasted as long as it did.

[Topo]

eight 50cm cannon?

WOW!

[Other Means]

Funniest/worst was a description of the P-47 which apparently is armed with eight 50cm cannon, giving it sufficient armament to duke it out with the Yamato class battleships. It's amazing the war lasted as long as it did.

Brilliantly armed but it was a bitch to fly - what with going backwards at supersonic speeds.

[SgtMuhammed]

Made egress from target much easier.

[ChrisND]

It was the only plane that launched a chute from its nose.

[panzermartin]

"Material from syrian's body"? I dont think BFC has ever modelled gory things like that. Maybe it was kicking dirt from the ground or the wall? They can go as far as some "aaargg my leg!" wav files.

[ChrisND]

In game the .50 cal sniper rifle sometimes kicks dirt from the ground in the same way that the Bushmaster does when it impacts.

[Joe Shaw]

There was an excerpt in one of Tom Brokaw's books that quoted some veteran as saying that they used the B-24 since its sonar was better than that on the P-47 but after a mission the floor of the B-24 was hip deep in 50 mm shells.

But in any case you can hardly expect THIS lot to ignore that kind of a misstatement ... goes with the territory.

Joe

[SgtMuhammed]

In game the .50 cal sniper rifle sometimes kicks dirt from the ground in the same way that the Bushmaster does when it impacts.

That might be it. The round probably continued through the target and struck the ground throwing up dust.

[Wildman]

or maybe it hit the guy and "kicked up chucks"....I'm glad that he had that "CM" moment and I for one am not going to try and disect his vision..

I only hope he has more and more "CM" Moments...they are what relationships are built on you know

[ChrisND]

Seriously though, I had a CM Moment ™ today when I watched some poor US soldiers walk into a room, proceeded to get torn to ribbons, and then bugged out of the building as fast as their overloaded legs could carry them. Nice feature!

[Dietrich]

The kick on that rifle must be one nasty sum'b*tch.

No joke: the muzzle blast of a .50BMG sniper rifle without a muzzle brake is about 175 dB -- equal to a quarter stick of dynamite at a distance of 1 m. Recoil without a muzzle brake is terrible, but with a muzzle brake, the rifle is 5 to 7 dB louder at the shooter's position because the brake directs more of the blast back at the shooter. The muzzle blast of the Accuracy International AW50 sniper rifle is 180 dB at a meter. The muzzle blast of a 105mm howitzer is only 3 dB louder at the same distance. Without a suppressor, the McMillan TAC-50 rifle is louder than 1 lb of TNT just two arm-spams away. Such blast overpressure has complex physiological effects: with continued exposure, the shooter's vision blurs, he starts to feel nauseous and dizzy, muscle tremors begin and then worse, and eventually its starts to degrade his central nervous system until he can no longer think clearly. According to Special Weapons for Military & Police magazine (April 2008), the US SpecOps community limits training with .50BMG weapons to no more than 50 rounds per day.

The author of that article in Special Weapons for Military & Police, a certain Al Paulson, wrote (italics added): "The first time I fired a .50BMG in the desert, the muzzle brake produced a substantial dust cloud for 26 feet on either side of the rifle that swirled about 12 feet high. Even if one discounts the substantial muzzle flash and severe gunshot noise, here was a 12x52-foot dust plume that said 'Here I am!'" (This was an article regarding Advanced Armament Corporation's Cyclops suppressor, which reduces the blast overpressure to less than 1/1000 and the muzzle blast to 137 dB (hearing safe = less than 140 dB).

Ofcourse, GBS meant .50 or 12.7mm rifle, in case he was unaware of his error and the cause of hilarity. Don't feel bad. Plenty of discovery channel translators mention planes with 20cm cannon, thus giving them the armament of a heavy cruiser.

Whenever I'm talking about anything related to WW2 military technology with this friend of mine, he always takes issue with the facts I recount because he has watched more History Channel and Military Channel than I ever have and thus evidently thinks he knows more about the subject than I do. But, the way I see it, he can't possibly know more than I do about WW2-era military technology, not only because he never actually researaches anything (whereas I have spent almost five years reading countless books, scouring the internet, and researching via other means) but because TV documentaries not infrequently make inaccurate or untrue statements. I recall watching a documentary about Operation Barbarossa which stated that the T-34 had a 75mm gun. This might seem a trifling error, since the difference between the gun's stated caliber and the actual caliber is only 1.62mm. But (as many of you will attest) this is actually a more glaring difference than meets the eye. Two contemporaneous high-velocity cannon, namely the American M1 and the British QF 17-pounder, had distinctly different performance characteristics though they were the same caliber, 76.2mm. The M1's armor-piercing performance was comparable to that of the Soviet 85mm cannon (as mounted on the T-34/85), while the 17-pounder's performance was superior even to that of the remarkable 75mm KwK 42 L/70.

[ChrisND]

No joke: the muzzle blast of a .50BMG sniper rifle without a muzzle brake is about 175 dB -- equal to a quarter stick of dynamite at a distance of 1 m. Recoil without a muzzle brake is terrible, but with a muzzle brake, the rifle is 5 to 7 dB louder at the shooter's position because the brake directs more of the blast back at the shooter. The muzzle blast of the Accuracy International AW50 sniper rifle is 180 dB at a meter. The muzzle blast of a 105mm howitzer is only 3 dB louder at the same distance. Without a suppressor, the McMillan TAC-50 rifle is louder than 1 lb of TNT just two arm-spams away. Such blast overpressure has complex physiological effects: with continued exposure, the shooter's vision blurs, he starts to feel nauseous and dizzy, muscle tremors begin and then worse, and eventually its starts to degrade his central nervous system until he can no longer think clearly. According to Special Weapons for Military & Police magazine (April 2008), the US SpecOps community limits training with .50BMG weapons to no more than 50 rounds per day.

I've shot them before actually. What surprised me is that it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. That's not to say that I'll be putting one on my nose and squeezing the trigger.

[SgtMuhammed]

Just be glad the Germans didn't build it. The concept of "recoil buffer" seems not to have made it to the German army.

[Dietrich]

The concept of "recoil buffer" seems not to have made it to the German army.

How so? I know even less about modern German military technology than I do about modern American (or Syrian/Russian) military technology, so I'm curious. =)

[SgtMuhammed]

With US weapons, M16 or M4 for example, there is a recoil buffer that reduces the kick to nearly nothing. You can fire forever and not get a sore shoulder. 30 Rounds with a G3 feels like someone hit you with a bat if you aren't prepared for it. Not really sure about the newer weapons, I got out before I could play with those.

[panzermartin]

Yes I remember firing the G3 was a kind of torture. Felt like fighting with the gun in each squeeze of the trigger. A guy next to me in the firing range lost control and got hit in the face from the buttstock. Nothing serious but he did have a bleeding cheekbone. Obviously he did something wrong there but goes to show the recoil of the rifle. And maybe that medical troops shouldn't be allowed to carry something heavier than bandages

[RadioactiveMan]

I must admit I don't know much about how guns work, but I spent the summer with two brothers who each had newly purchased .50 rifles (purchasing them was soon going to become illegal, and they thought they would get in before that). Anyway, I got to see them shoot and these guys said the kick was pretty minimal. I tried to heft the gun and it was heavy as hell... thank goodness for bipods It is, indeed, quite loud, and the rounds are huge!