Once you have your rifle in hand, you’ll need to know where to point it. Yoursightsare there to help you aim. Over the course of history, many types of sights have been made to fulfill different specific tasks.
The region of transitional ballistics is very temporary. Transitional ballistics apply in the moment when the bullet leaves the muzzle, as the expanding gasses rush out around it. It ends when the surrounding gasses have reduced in pressure to meet that of the normal atmosphere.
A few scopes are built to sit much farther away. They have a much longer eye relief than is standard. For this very simple reason, they're called long eye relief scopes. Sometimes, you'll see that written as LER.
Thebarrelis the place where the bullet builds up speed, starts to spin, and gets going on the right path. Once the primer is struck, the powder burns and heats, the reaction speeding up as more powder heats up yet more powder and sets it off too. This expanding mass of hot air and burning propellant shoves the bullet down the barrel, burning more as it goes.
In a nutshell; theactionis the portion of the rifle that performs theactionof firing the round and ejecting the cartridge. The action is the mechanical structure responsible for loading a cartridge into the chamber, firing, and ejecting a cartridge. Let’s just say - this is literally where the action happens. Make all the puns you want.
Powder is the stuff that really sends the bullet flying. Once the primer sets off the reaction, powder burns. As the powder burns, the pressure and temperature in the chamber and the barrel skyrocket. The rising temperature and pressure cause more powder to burn, speeding up the process until it completes.
Rimfirecases have the priming compound built into the case - specifically, around the inside of the rim. The firing pin of a rimfire rifle hits the rim of the case instead of the center. They do not have a separate priming cap at the middle of the head.
Theprimeris the little swab of explosive material that sets off the rest of the propellant. To be more specific - in a centerfire cartridge, the primer is a small metalcapwith a tiny amount of explosive compound inside, set into theprimer pocketat the base of the case (thecase head).
Here are common classifications of bullets and what they may be used for. This is a list of some of the more common terms you may come across, though more seem to appear every day. Some bullets are differentiated by shape, some by material.
One term you’ll hear thrown around quite often isBC. BC is theBallistic Coefficient, a rather important number in the world ofbullet flight efficiency. A higher BC means a bullet will retain velocity better - have lessnegative acceleration, less drag from the air resistance - in similar conditions to a low BC bullet.
Most bullets are made almost entirely oflead. Lead has been the top choice in bullets for hundreds of years now, and it’s all due to a few simple reasons - it’s very dense, it’s easy to cast, and it’s fairly malleable.
