What are the chances?

Sako75Hunter

Well-Known Member
Some of you may well have seen this already, but I came across this amazing image online of two bullets that collided in mid air during the Battle of Gallipoli on WW1.
 

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I’ve come across this before.

The conclusion seems to be that it was a deliberate set up - someone shot at an unfired round. Possibly as part of a target challenge.
 
Could easily have hit another bullet in a bandolier, or magazine, etc. Apparently, during some American Civil War Battles, the intensity of firing warts great that it happened quite often. These would be lead balls mostly though, I would've thought?

Some really interesting info' in this link . . .

 
I would imagine a fairly high likelihood of it happening in mid air also given say a m/c gun position firing on another which was also firing at it?

I guess in theory if 2 snipers where aiming at each others muzzles with the same chambered rifles and the same cartridges, rifling, barrel length etc etc then the bullets would collide if they timed pulling the trigger correctly to meet at half range and at the same trajectory........

S
 
There are dozens of examples of mid air collisions of musket bullets from the US Civil War battlefields. Two groups of soldiers, firing directly at each other: not so hard to imagine a mid air collision.~Muir
 
There are two collided bullets in the fantastic museum at Gettysburg - from memory Minnies but don’t quote me. I have also seen a number of examples in musees around the Somme battlefields - usually a live bullet hitting a clip or belt but more often in the brass. Also a number of examples of bibles and other pocket contents “saving” a life but not sure about these because pocket bibles are very thin and IMHO wouldn’t stop much in the way of .303 or 8mm. But who knows - maybe at great distance?
🦊🦊
 
given the sheer number of rounds fired the total ruin of lands is no suprise that marks are not shown. Just look at the tracers coming up in WW2 film to see that
trashed
barrels were used.
 
Wasnt there an episode of mythbusters that looked into a 'myth' from the American civil war regarding a minie ball passing through a soldiers scrotum and carrying on to hit a woman bystander , making her pregnant thus coining the term "son of a gun"
nothing to do with the OP but an interesting story nontheless.
 
Have you seen the size of a minnie? There is nothing "mini" about it - if that hit you down by the "south pole" it would empty the scrotum in pretty short order. Makes my eyes water just thinking about it!!!
🐺🐺
 
Doesn't a bullet rotate at something like 180k rpm? If both were doing that then surely the hole won't be perfectly through the bullet but would be torn to pieces? Makes me think the bullet that has been hit was standing upright and not spinning at all, hence no rifling marks on it. Not to mention it has been hit at 90° side on rather than head on.
 
Wasnt there an episode of mythbusters that looked into a 'myth' from the American civil war regarding a minie ball passing through a soldiers scrotum and carrying on to hit a woman bystander , making her pregnant thus coining the term "son of a gun"
nothing to do with the OP but an interesting story nontheless.
Son of a gun is a British term I believe. It was used to describe a boy child of a sailor that ran a cannon on the old sailing ships. The “guns” used to bring their family with them. That’s the story I have heard.
 
From wiki
“A 1787 correspondent to The Gentleman's Magazine suggested that the phrase originally meant "a soldier's brat".[5]


A 19th-century gun deck (HMS Victory).
The phrase potentially has its origin in a Royal Navy direction that pregnant women aboard smaller naval vessels give birth in the space between the broadside guns, in order to keep the gangways and crew decks clear”.

presumably they had to time their delivery between actions!
🦊🦊
 
Warminster small arms school has an Enfield with a Mauser bullet in it’s muzzle. Exact memory is lacking but it was pretty amazing
 
Amazing! WW1 British snipers were instructed to shoot at the machine gun rather than the gunners as replacing the gun was a lot harder than the men who fired it. Later german machine guns had a round bulletproof plate fixed just behind the muzzle to protect the vulnerable cooling system.
🦊🦊
 
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