When I see footage of tracer rounds going off from turrets in (I think) in bombers, the glow of the round looks all spikey when it flies away. Does it look this way from all angles, or just from the gunner's perspective? What causes this effect?
2007-02-04 03:52:44 · 7 answers · asked by Dan 5 in Cars & Transportation ➔ Aircraft
Vibrations cause the camera to shake even if it is on a solid mount. A .50 caliber machinegun round has the recoil of about five 12 gauge shotgun shells fired at once. There's a whole lot of shakin' goin' on at ten .50s per second (600 rounds per minute).
2007-02-04 09:58:24 · answer #1 · answered by RANDLE W 4 · 1⤊ 0⤋
YES.They are perfectly safe as long as they are handled and stored as you would any other surplus ammunition. There is no need to deactivate them. The Powdered chemicals that make them tracer rounds will breakdown in time, but that just means they might not leave a tracer trail as they were designed to do originally if fired. They never will become unstable or dangerous with the passing of time.Just don't throw them into a fire or put them in the garbage for the trash men to collect if you decide you don't want them, the easiest way is to take them out into the woods and bury them...Other than that you are completely safe and they will not destabilize......
2016-05-24 03:55:29 · answer #2 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
I think perhaps some gun cameras would shake in their mounts from the guns firing while the film was rolling. It wouldnt take too much movement to effect the bright glowing tracer light on a film.Theres lots of footage that show the tracers flying straight and not all squiggley like you describe.
Just my thought.
2007-02-04 05:08:53 · answer #3 · answered by dave b 6 · 1⤊ 0⤋
The tracer goes straight in the usual way, it's the camera that's bouncing around. You can experience the same effect by chewing something crunchy while looking at a fluorescent display, like the clock on some microwaves, it looks like it's bouncing around but it's just an odd optical effect.
2007-02-04 09:32:26 · answer #4 · answered by Chris H 6 · 4⤊ 0⤋
What you have seen is a combination of recoil vibrations and optical illusion due to the difference in aircraft and tracer vectors.
The hot-line gun sights available for modern fighters, when the gun is the selected weapon, incorporates this illusion into their visualization.
2007-02-04 18:42:32 · answer #5 · answered by ? 6 · 0⤊ 0⤋
They look like streaks of green/red/white whatever the chemical composition is. Coming at you, my experience was they seem slow in the distance, then zip by.
The squiggly/spikely appearance is due to vibration of the camera, or focus issues.
(Turrets didn't have gun cameras. What you're seeing are gun cameras on fighters. Or, a handheld camera run by a crewmember/newsreel.)
2007-02-04 09:58:33 · answer #6 · answered by jim 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋
old footage. their recording back then was not as good as todays.
2007-02-04 04:09:06 · answer #7 · answered by cparkmi331 3 · 0⤊ 2⤋