Crazy thing I found in the pacific fighters manual
 

Page 15 under aerial gunnery it says..

" a bullet at 50 meters can puncture light to medium armor but at 500 meters it may even bounce off human skin."

we are talking about aircraft machine gun rifle caliber bullets aren't we? :?

I never have heard of a 50 caliber browning or three 0 three caliber AP bullet bouncing off of anyone's skin at 500 meters..

Is it a Japanese aerial round they are talking about? :)

Re: Crazy thing I found in the pacific fighters manual
 

No clue, but unless its actually going thru something first, its well, wrong.

The .30 caliber rounds ( or .303 or 7.92 by the Krauts) used previous to the 50 cal all were quite deadly out past 500 meters, even against lightly armoured targets.

stalkervision,
dont take it literally, I believe they are just trying to explain that with distance bullets lose power.

well if you mean I am going to check this out personally I won't.. :lol:

Ok! all we need is personal testimony from someone who has experienced bullets bouncing off their skin. Where is that man in the blue and red suit when you need him?

OK here I come to save the daaaayyyyy!!!
 

I will reveal that I am indeed Superman. But don't tell anyone, as I need to protect the innocent. ;) Bullets bounce off me all the time. Heck, I even caught a .50 cal with my teeth. Using my telescopic vision I saw the would-be sniper faint when he witnessed that little trick. Luckily I caught him as he was falling from his roof-top hide. After a superspeed whoop@ss session I hauled him off to jail. :D
Super...er Flyby

If they're talking about firing at another aircraft (seems likely as PF is a flight sim) 500m away, moving away from you, the bullets will have a much longer flight time than if fired against a stationary target, you could also say that the bullets travel a lot longer than 500m (relative to the ground), how much obviously depending on how fast you're going, if that's so then the bullets could in fact bounce off human skin.

you forget both planes are moving in a similiar relation to each other. they are esentially stationary to each other then. In fact the trailing plane may be closing the distance! Then What? :lol:

Yeah, that's true, missed that :D Anyways, in a certain scenario a bullet could bounce off of human skin at 500m but maybe they didn't intend it to be interpreted literally?

Just consider:

1. air
2. drag
3. friction

psst.....aircraft has skin too :wink:


The problems with many explosive "MG" sized rounds early on was that they often showed little effect, even less then standard AP, and even in some cases less then a standard round.......The trouble being, they tended to explode on impact upon the outside of the aircrafts skin (that being if they didn't before leaving the barrel), the explosion actually causing the round to shatter and blow away/back from the aircraft sometimes even resulting in zero penetration.

It really depends on what you term 'Bounce'

You can bounce a 50 cal bullet (or any projectile for that matter, stones shells etc. ) off the surface of water if you get the angle right, and (in a classical monty python leap of logic!) the human body is 70% water. So given the right angle!