Sniper Physics: The 3,800 m Shot in Ukraine, Coriolis Drift and Whitworths

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In November 2023 a member of the Ukrainian security service hit a target 3,800 meters away, more than two miles, breaking a Canadian special forces record of 3,540 meters. The word sniper goes back to British soldiers in 1770s India who earned the title by shooting the snipe, a camouflaged bird that flies in an erratic zigzag. Modern long range shooting is a team calculation: the spotter reads heat mirage and wind downrange, corrects for slant range when firing up or down a slope, accounts for air density, and at extreme range even for the Coriolis effect, since a bullet can fly 10 to 12 seconds while the Earth turns beneath it. The shooter lies prone, controls breathing and squeezes the trigger between heartbeats.

The craft grew with the technology. German and Swiss shooting clubs of the 15th century prized accuracy, but smoothbore muskets relied on volume of fire until Sir Joseph Whitworth's hexagonal barrel and bullet reached 2,000 yards in 1857 trials, and the Confederacy bought his rifles. In the Second Boer War the British Lovat Scouts, Highland woodsmen, became the first unit known to wear the ghillie suit. Germany's optics dominated early World War I, and the Soviet Union trained more than 400,000 marksmen before and during World War II.

• Misjudging range by 100 meters with a 7.62 mm NATO round drops the bullet about 8 inches low.
• Major Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard's school used papier mâché dummy heads, some smoking cigarettes through rubber tubing, then pushed a rod through the bullet holes to locate German snipers.
• Lyudmila Pavlichenko recorded 309 confirmed kills, and Vasily Zaitsev turned the ruins of Stalingrad into a sniper's terrain.
• Snipers time shots to thunder, jets or artillery to mask the report.
• The US Red Owl system compares a bullet's shockwave with the muzzle blast to point a laser back at the shooter.