Comments
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@random09, Well, the time it took for the Apollo 11 spacecraft to get to the moon was about three days. If you take into account a bullet's velocity, it's very likely the earth would have already rotated from the time you originally fired to the bullet striking. tl;dr You shoot it at Ohio, it might end up in Nepal.
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@random09, But you'd also have to take into account weather conditions near your target, the moon's orbit vs. the Earth's spin. (So that'd be some strange sort of "Coriolis Effect") as well as "Kentucky Windage" (where the bullet's spin pulls it to the right or left). Even the concentration of gases in the atmosphere in the particular area where the bullet enters can have an effect.
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@I Punt Pugs, awwww dang I wish I had been here sooner. Reading all your guys comments was literally painful. You tried so hard to prove how this could work and nobody, not one person, remembered that the moon isn't just sitting up there stationary. It has a very large relative velocity as it goes around the earth. The velocity of the bullet would be no doubt large enough to escape lunar orbit... ONCE but after that it would still have the majority of the velocity of the moon going around the earth and it would start to orbit earth at a slightly elliptical orbit on the same plane as the moon, and this is only if the bullet was fired tangential to the moon towards its retrograde velocity vector. Otherwise the moon's velocity would actually be added to the bullet's. But in any case, periapsis would still be too high to ever reach the earth. It would just orbit, but since it's still on the same plane as the moon, eventually it will encounter the moon again in its orbit and collide with it
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@Captain Swordsman, kinetic bombardment has been around a lot longer than Call of duty. The first idea of it was in the fifties. Since then it has become one of the most sought after weapons of the jar few decades. If it were just science fiction then there wouldn't be articles in the SALT II treaties prohibiting kinetic outer space weaponry. It's absolutely fascinating how much planning has been put into this project.
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@I Punt Pugs, Actually, and I could be wrong, I don't believe it would. The heat created when reentering the atmosphere is air being compressed against the object because the air can't move out of the way. To put it simply, the smaller the object the less heat created. Additionally, its for this reason that you probably couldn't fully cook an 8oz. steak by having it reenter the atmosphere.
Not to be that guy, but wouldn't the bullet burn up in the atmosphere?