killyg, on November 09 2012 - 05:40 PM, said:
One last post, if you guys still don't get it then I give up.
notice in your own picture, the very first sonic boom is at the SAME place as the traveling object_ That's why someone getting shot hears the sonic boom at the SAME TIME.
this is not magic. How do I know this_ Because I've tried it! I stood down-range at a 600yds rifle lane and listened to 5.56x45mm and 7.62x51mm whiz TOWARDS me, not PAST me. The bullet hit the dirt at the same time the sonic boom arrives in my ears.
But notice in your picture, there is no immediate air compression in front of the bullet - yet.
The reason is simple - the bullet has yet to arrive;
therefore it has not pushed the air out of the way. The only way for it to begin pushing air out of the way, and do a sonic boom, is obviously for it to travel that distance.
You will hear the crack of the sound barrier being broken before the report of the gun, definitely, but the simple fact is that by the time you hear the crack, the bullet is already at you - but it will reach its target before your brain processes the sound, due to the fact that the neural pathways are also limited in speed (something like approximately 250 miles per hour, I think, but don't quote me on that). This, of course, means that for your body to react, your brain must send signals to your muscles, which then contract, and instill a fight-or-flight response and put your body under stress.
So while it's possible - in theory - to maybe hear the compression of air, you're not hearing the sonic boom (which is what you're arguing) until after the bullet has effectively passed you slightly, depending on your distance from the bullet (the closer it is to you, the quicker the boom reaches you, naturally). This means if your head was the actual target, if you heard it, you've already been shot in the head, because we can assume even if you did hear the air compressing, there is no way reaction times would allow you to dodge the bullet, obviously - not when that 5.56x45mm NATO round travels at over 900 meters a second. If you were standing 600 meters away from where it was shot, but only perhaps a couple dozen feet away from the target, then the effect is nearly instantaneous - the bullet passes you 2/3 of a second after it was actually fired; the sonic boom would hit your ears perhaps some milliseconds later. Now, if you were 600 meters away and, say, 300 meters wide from the target, you'd get a definite lagtime on hearing the shot compared to your visual acquisition of the shot hitting, and obviously you'd never hear the bullet whizzing at all, as the sonic boom would drown out the small bullet whizz with ease.
Lastly, the sonic boom isn't at the tip of the bullet - it is, again, at the wake of the bullet. If you're arguing air compression, you're absolutely correct that it would precede the bullet (although whether you'd hear it considering the speed it's traveling compared to the sonic boom is another thing entirely, as I said). The sonic boom, however, follows the wake of the object pushing with enough force to break sound; the sound then travels omnidirectionally. If you're a couple dozen feet away, it's effectively instantaneous. If you're about 350 meters away, you'll see it about a second before you hear it.
Either way, PiVoR is right - this is all way off-topic. The only way we'll really know is if we get shot in the head, and I'm not keen to find out what that's like.
To get back on-topic, essentially, I'm fine with, if need be, a slightly clearer notice Sharpshooters are out and about. However, lighting them up on Radar, or giving auditory warnings past that every time they fire a shot, and expecting the sound to travel long distances is probably a bit too much. The game isn't exactly ultra-realistic (not until we build our own mechs, anyway!) so let's not get swamped in the semantics of realism.
0
