USA –-(Ammoland.com)- Long range shooting is kind of like throwing a baseball from right field to home plate. When you boil down all the complexity, you really only have to worry about two things: how far the bullet falls before it hits the target and how far the wind blows it sideways.
If you want to make your head hurt, you can add in more variables like moving targets, rotation of the earth, and bullet spindrift, but for now, we’ll keep things simple.
There are only two major guiding principles to worry about for most longer-range shooting scenarios: gravity and wind.
Gravity
Like political promises in an election year, you can always count on gravity. Fortunately, when it comes to long-range shooting, gravity is simpler than it may seem at first glance. People get all wrapped around the axle about velocity and bullet shape and how those things “defeat gravity,” but those don’t really have anything to do with defying gravity, at least not directly. You see, gravity only cares about how long an object is exposed to it. If you shoot a bullet exactly parallel to the ground and drop one from your hand at the same time, they’ll both impact the dirt at precisely the same instant, although at very different places. It’s all about the amount of time that the bullet feels the effect of gravity.
When you’re shooting long range, you have to predict the impact of gravity so you can adjust accordingly. Remember, the only thing that determines how fast gravity shoves your bullet towards the ground is time, so everything else just determines how much time the
