sealgair243

There was a nifty FreeWare Program that Remington Released called "Shoot" that was a ballistics program, but it allowed you to get GRAPHICAL comparisons of the drop, energy, deflection, and velocity. You would imput the range at which it was "zeroed" and would allow you to examine the graphs with the above variables with respect to time. This isn't a difficult technology, and I'm surprised there isn't a bigger program out there already to do this for more than just remington rounds. Its just a Quadratic equation, though it has to take in the zero range, ballistic coefficient, muzzle velocity, and such to compute it. Ok, so its more than just a quadratic, but that's the basic equation for how the trajectory is going to behave over time. Interestingly enough, because of the energy equation Ke= .5m(v^2) where v is the velocity of the bullet and m is the mass, you can see that a faster bullet will have a square relationship to its kinetic energy. This is interesting when it comes to optimization, because for some ranges, the lighter, faster bullet will have more energy (read: more knockdown power) and a more massive bullet will have less. But depending on how air friction acts on these bullets, there may be a point at which a larger, slower bullet has equal energy to the smaller bullet. This can be important for determining caliber for what ranges you typically shoot. Again, this is a complicated thing because it requires lots of steps to compare loads, but again, the computer programs can make this go much faster and more efficiently.