
Looking out from the inside of a rifled barrel. The opening of every James
Bond film begins with this image.
A rifle is a long gun whose barrel has been grooved or "rifled"
on the inside with spiral channels. (For comparison, a long gun with a smooth
bore is called a musket.) Bullets fired from a rifled barrel spin. This gives
them greater stability in flight and thus greater accuracy when fired. Since
1964, the standard infantry weapon in the US Army has been the .22 caliber M16
rifle. Due to rifling, a bullet fired from an M16 rotates two and a half times
on its journey from the breech to the muzzle. Given a barrel
length of 510 mm and a muzzle velocity of 950 m/s, determine …