The farthest shot. Ultra-long sniper shots

What can one shot do? Eliminate the person. Change history. Stop the enemy's advance. Save a platoon of comrades in arms. Professionals in their field always deserve respectful treatment among people in their specialty. Army snipers are no exception; the fate of the entire operation often depends on the accuracy of their fire.

1. From a machine gun for two kilometers

When Carlos Hascock was a child, he loved to hunt small birds and squirrels with a small-caliber rifle. Hascock's talent for shooting was discovered by his service in the US Marine Corps. The young man was sent to Vietnam. The enemies appreciated the sniper's skills faster than the American command, setting a price of 30 thousand dollars for the sniper's head (a colossal amount at that time).

On missions, the American used a Winchester Model 70 rifle. However, he set his main record using an M2 Browning heavy machine gun with an 8X Unertl optical sight mounted on a makeshift bracket. Hascock "picked up" an enemy courier at a range of 2,300 meters. This record was considered a world record from 1967 to 2002.

2. One bullet kills six

The identity of this shooter is kept secret by the American command. All that is known is that he serves as a corporal in the 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards. At the time of the record shot, the soldier was only 20 years old.
In the unit, the corporal very quickly established himself as an excellent marksman, and therefore was the first to gain access to the high-quality sniper rifle L115A3 AWM .338 caliber. In Afghanistan, a fighter killed a Taliban machine gunner with a hit to the chest at a distance of 1339 meters.

The corporal made his most striking shot in the province of Helmund, when he was covering the positions of the British who were attacked by the Taliban. Six militants, including a suicide bomber, were approaching the Allied trench. The corporal shot at the last one and caused the vest to explode, killing all six. The shot was fired from a distance of 850 meters.

3. 10 seconds flight

The record for the longest shot was set by an “unnamed” sniper of the Coalition troops during an operation against terrorists of a group now banned in Russia. A soldier of the 2nd Joint Task Force, using a McMillan TAC-50 rifle, effectively disrupted the entire militant offensive with one shot, killing the commander at the position of Iraqi soldiers at a distance of 3,450 meters. The bullet flew to the target for 10 seconds.

4. Black shot

British Army Corporal Christopher Reynolds killed a Taliban commander nicknamed "Mula" with two shots at a distance of 1,853 meters. Reynolds had to wait for the target in ambush for three days. The corporal's first shot missed, but the range was such that the Taliban did not even immediately realize that they had come under fire. The sniper fired from an L115A3 rifle.

5. 25 football fields

The case of Craig Harrison is a prime example of how the media can ruin a person's life. While serving in Afghanistan, Craig saved fellow soldiers who were pinned down by machine-gun fire from Taliban militants. The incident occurred in Helmand province. The corporal fired six shots at a distance of 2,475 meters and was able to eliminate two machine gunners. Harrison's shot is notable because it was fired from an L115A3 rifle, and the distance to the machine gunners was almost twice the effective firing range of that weapon.

Unfortunately, Craig's name ended up in the media. Very soon, unknown persons began to threaten him and his family. The corporal himself began to suffer from mental disorder(due to constant stress), and his family completely fell apart.

Do you want to learn even more interesting things? Then read about it, which everyone will appreciate.

Many people underestimate the work of a sniper, however, in fact, he is faced with some of the most difficult tasks during combat operations. In difficult conditions, you have to hunt down a target for a long time without giving away your location to the enemy. In addition, you have to shoot from a long distance, which only the best of the best can do. It is about the best snipers who managed to hit the target from the longest distances that we will talk further.

Christopher Reynolds
Distance: 1,852 meters

The most accurate shot was fired by British sniper Christopher Reynolds. His target was a field commander nicknamed "Mullah", who took responsibility for several recent terrorist attacks in the region. Reynolds destroyed the commander with one flick of his finger, for which he received a medal from the hands of the Queen of England herself.

Sniper South Africa
Distance: 2,124 meters

One of the snipers of the regular army of South Africa (the name of the fighter is classified) achieved amazing results: over the course of several days, the soldier “shot” 5-6 rebels of the M23 group - all at a distance of about two kilometers.

Carlos Hatchcock
Distance: 2,286 meters

In 1967, Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hatchcock set a very unusual record: instead of a sniper rifle, this master used an M2 .50 Browning machine gun, equipped, for fun, with an optical sight. Carlos managed to shoot a Viet Cong at a distance of more than two kilometers, which to this day remains a record for automatic weapons.

Brian Kremer
Distance: 2,285 meters

Sergeant Brian Cramer was deployed to Iraq with the 2nd US Ranger Battalion. The mission of this detachment is still classified - it is only known that the shot from sniper Kremer brought him fame as the best shooter of the entire operation.

Arron Perry
Distance: 2,413 meters

Another Canadian sniper also distinguished himself in Operation Anaconda. Arron Perry managed to shoot an Afghan with an RPG at a distance of more than two kilometers, and Perry pulled the trigger, guided only by the random reflection of the sun on the enemy gun.

Bruno Turcotte
Distance: 2,414 meters

Bruno Turcotte was part of a group of Canadian peacekeepers conducting an operation on the dangerous Afghan slopes. His shot saved an entire detachment of American infantrymen: the soldiers were climbing the mountain and did not see the machine gunner, who was already ready to open fire. Bruno's lightning-fast reaction earned him the rank of master corporal.

Corporal Harrison
Distance: 2,462 meters

A British sniper, Corporal Horse Craig Harrison, served in an infantry support unit. The battle that took place in November 2009 made this brave guy a real legend among his colleagues. Harrison managed to neutralize the driver, shooter and passenger of an Afghan pickup truck equipped with a machine gun with three shots. Three out of three are at a distance of almost two and a half kilometers.

This story began several years ago, when Russian shooter and manufacturer of high-precision long-range rifles Vlad Lobaev saw a video on YouTube where cheerful old men from Texas hit a target with a rifle at a distance of 3,600 yards (3,292 m). Vlad decided to take on the challenge and compete with the Americans. Fortunately, he had his own weapons factory, Lobaev Arms, at hand.

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The Americans fired from a custom-made ultra-long-range rifle of rare caliber .375 CheyTac. By that time, Lobaev’s company was already mass-producing the ultra-long-range rifle SVLK-14 “Twilight” in an even rarer and more powerful .408 CheyTac caliber, which allows sniper shooting at distances of over 2 km. For the record, they took a special custom “Twilight” with a titanium chassis and firing pin, with a barrel length of 720 mm and a weight of more than 9 kg. In April 2015, on a field in the Kaluga region (there are simply no multi-kilometer shooting ranges in Russia), with this rifle, Lobaev’s team, after sighting shots, hit a target at a distance of 3400 m. The video with the record was posted on YouTube. The Americans reacted calmly: they say, okay, let's continue the duel in absentia.

Record rifle SVLK-14 “Twilight”

Subsonic

Not only the Americans reacted: a French sniper from the Foreign Legion, after long training, hit a target at a distance of 3600 m, but, apart from an article in a small specialized magazine, there is no information about this record, no one posted videos. The Americans also crossed the mark, first 3600 and then 4000 yards (3657 m). Lobaev’s company studied this video almost under a microscope: some parameters of the shot did not match, the flight time did not match up with the initial speed and angle of inclination of the bar. Nothing has changed in ballistics, but several hundred meters have been added. This does not happen, but since the competition was originally conceived as a competition of gentlemen, the Lobaevites decided to continue to shoot fairly with the Americans. And win by knockout - hit from four kilometers away.

Ultra-long-range shooting for shooters is considered to be shooting at a distance where at the end of the trajectory the bullet travels at deep subsonic levels, because with supersonic everything is clear - there ballistics are calculated easily, using simple mathematical methods. But subsonic ballistics is considered more difficult, and what is most unpleasant is that in this mode some physical processes occur that make it difficult to shoot at ultra-long distances. Firstly, a re-stabilization effect occurs. The linear speed slows down per 1000 m, say, three times - from 900 m/s to 300 m/s. And the bullet rotation speed is only 5-10%. At subsonic speeds the speed is even lower, but the rotation speed is still the same. This leads to the fact that all the design and manufacturing defects of the bullet begin to come out, which greatly affects the dispersion. In addition, at low speeds, errors in assessing wind and weather conditions become noticeable. The second factor is turbulence in the bottom part at deep subsonic levels. At speeds slightly less than 300 m/s this is not critical, but at ranges of more than 2 km it greatly affects accuracy. There is only one way to combat these phenomena - to develop a bullet design with a different bottom design.

Classic problems for ultra-long range shooting require increased bullet weight and improved aerodynamics. Lobaev set his first record with a standard D27 bullet, an analogue of the Lost River, widely known in the West. These are elongated, solidly turned bullets for long-range shooting, also called Ultra VLD. They were no longer suitable for new records. If you follow the path of increasing the mass of the bullet, you will need to change the entire cartridge - either increase the chamber or use a new progressively burning powder, or even switch to a different caliber. Another caliber (Browning .50 or domestic 12.7 x 108 mm) is a transition to another class and a completely different weapon with all the ensuing consequences: other barrels, bolts, receivers, dimensions, weight and a significant increase in recoil, at which There is no longer any question of pleasure from shooting.

Lobaev decided not to deviate from the old cartridge case and caliber .408 CheyTac, not to change either the dimensions or weight of the weapon. He was able to develop a heavier 30 gram D30 bullet while staying within the standard cartridge. This was also done because the cartridge is quite accessible and anyone can try to repeat the achievement. The design of the bullet was also modified: it began to resemble a long elongated spindle with two pointed ends, which made it possible to achieve an almost ideal ballistic coefficient of one. This required a change in the rifle's design, with a faster rifling pitch to stabilize the longer, heavier bullet. If the classic rifling pitch in the 408 caliber is thirteen, then Lobaev decided to use ten on the record-breaking rifle. Despite the fact that the initial speed of the new bullet was lower (875 m/s for the D30 versus 935 m/s for the D27), it had a flatter trajectory at 2 km.

Lateral support

One of the main problems with record shooting is that you can't keep raising the bar forever. optical sight. When shooting at such distances, the rifle has large elevation angles, as when shooting overhead, almost like a howitzer. At the top point of the trajectory, the bullet travels at an altitude of several hundred meters. No scopes allow such adjustments for aiming, so for record shooting they use special rails for the scope. However, you cannot endlessly raise the bar: the muzzle device begins to block the aiming line. This is exactly what confused Lobaev in the last American record: the angle of inclination of the bar did not correspond to the correction required for such a distance. Lobaev spotted a solution to this problem at the artillery, where the sight had long been moved to the left of the barrel. The solution is simple, but no one in the world has used it before Lobaev. If you look closely at the photo, you can see that the sight on Lobaev’s record-breaking rifles runs to the left of the barrel. Which turned out to be more convenient for shooting: you don’t need to throw your head back and you can take the optimal position.

Lobaev's know-how is the side mount of the sight for ultra-long-range shooting. A year ago it was forbidden to even photograph it. This system can also be used by troops: when shooting at long distances, it helps to get by with available Russian sights.

On the second try

They were going to break the record last summer in the fields near Krasnodar. For this purpose, a giant target measuring 10 x 10 m was made in order to at least take aim. No one knew how a bullet behaved at such distances, and there were no precise mathematical models. It was only clear that the bullets would enter the ground in the target area almost vertically, so the target was positioned at a large angle. Another difficulty was that the soil was wet during the shooting, so it was necessary to hit the target exactly: traces of hitting the ground at such low speeds and almost vertical corners not visible. Unfortunately for the entire team, the record failed the first time: they failed to hit even such a large target. While they were preparing for the next round, the Americans posted a video on the Internet with a 4 km record. It became clear that we needed to shoot even further.

For the past year, Lobaev and his team have been conjuring their magic on the rifle and new bullets, practically not giving out information about the project, fearing to jinx the world record, constantly approaching the cherished milestone, first taking 4170 m, then 4200. And in October of this year they succeeded in the incredible: famous shooter and promoter Andrei Ryabinsky hit a target measuring 1 x 1 m from a distance of 4210 m. For such a shot, it was necessary to take into account a huge number of factors, including the rotation of the Earth - the bullet spent 13 seconds in the air! As the record holder himself said, it took him eight years to achieve this shot. So now the ball is in American territory. Or, more correctly, a bullet.

The new record for sniper shooting range belongs to the team of Vladislav Lobaev, a Russian weapons manufacturer whose high-precision sniper rifles have been adopted by the FSB and FSO of Russia.

The record was set on September 28, 2017 at a training ground in the Tula region in Russia. Effective shot fired Andrey Ryabinsky from a distance of 4,170 meters on a target measuring 1x2 meters, from a rifle SVLK-14S "Dusk" cartridge caliber .408 Cheytac.

To set a new long-distance shooting record, Lobaev Arms specialists modified the rifle and modified the cartridge. This made it possible to accelerate a bullet weighing 30 grams to an initial speed of 1000 m/s.

As Vladislav Lobaev himself reported, 4170 meters is slightly more than the recent record of colleagues from North America— they recorded a shot at 4,157 meters. However, this is not the limit. In the coming days, Russian gunsmiths plan to set a new record - 4,200 meters!

In addition to the production of high-precision weapons, Lobaev's team has already distinguished itself with record shooting - in April 2015 they set. After this event, debate flared up on the Internet about whether live shooting at such distances makes sense. Some particularly knowledgeable “experts” claimed that the bullet supposedly loses all destructive power and falls on the head like “pigeon droppings.” Let's leave these statements on their conscience and on the conscience of the developers computer games, where “experts” draw their knowledge, and in order to find the truth, let’s turn to reality.

In June of this year, in the Iraqi city of Mosul, Canadian sniper from the unit special purpose Joint Task Force 2 killed one of the ISIS militants with a precise shot ( terrorist organization banned in Russia, CIS countries and Europe), attacking Iraqi army soldiers. The most remarkable thing about this story is that the shot was fired from a distance of just over 2 miles, namely - 3,540 meters!

Canadian sniper in Iraq
(c) dinardetectives.info

The command of Canada's special operations forces did not disclose the name of the sniper and the circumstances of the battle, saying that the fact of the shot and the elimination of the militant was confirmed by documentary satellite photography.

It is only known that the sniper used a rifle McMillan TAC-50 with ammunition .50 BMG (12.7×99 mm), the sniper position at the time of the shot was in a high-rise building, the flight time of the bullet was about 10 seconds. At the same time, the shot had a strong demoralizing effect on the terrorists and actually disrupted the offensive, representatives of the Canadian military department reported.

The previous record for a “combat” sniper shot was set in 2009 in Afghanistan, in the Musa Qala region. Then Corporal Craig Harrison, a special forces sniper from the UK, shot McMillan TAC-50 eliminated 2 Taliban machine gunners from a distance 2,475 meters.

Harrison said that on the day of the record shot, the weather was almost ideal and absolutely no wind, and visibility was excellent. It took him 9 sighting shots to then accurately hit the target with 3 shots. The bullets fired by the corporal from a sniper rifle reached their targets in 6 seconds.

There is also information about the supposedly absolute record for the range of a shot from a sniper rifle - 3,850 meters, which was set last year Jim Spinell from the American company Hill Country Rifle. But this is not a “combat” shot, but in terms of high-precision shooting in “peaceful” conditions, the world record now belongs to the team of Vladislav Lobaev.

Russian sniper Andrei Ryabinsky, in a team with spotters Yuri Sinichkin, Evgeniy Titov and Vladimir Grebenyuk, set a world record for precision shooting range with a sniper rifle. According to a blog post by the Russian arms company Lobaev Arms, the range of the accurate shot was 4210 meters.

For accurate shooting, the SVLK-14S “Twilight” rifle was used, specially designed for the maximum possible range of an accurate shot. According to Ryabinsky, the bullet covered a distance of 4210 meters in 13 seconds. For targeted shooting at such a distance, experts took into account many factors, including wind, Atmosphere pressure, derivation, temperature and rotation of the Earth.

Derivation is the deflection of a rotating bullet after a shot. The deflection occurs perpendicular to the plane of the oncoming air flow. The displacement of the bullet coincides with the direction of the rifling of the barrel of the weapon from which it was fired. For the SVD sniper rifle, the deflection is up to 60 centimeters when shooting at a target at a distance of one kilometer.

Many modern sights for small arms derivation is taken into account constructively. In particular, the PSO-1 for SVD is specially mounted so that after the shot the bullet goes slightly to the left. In artillery, this phenomenon is either included in the firing tables, or is also taken into account constructively.

The SVLK-14S sniper rifle is available in three calibers: .408 Chey Tac (10.36 x 77 mm), .338 Lapua Magnum (8.6 x 70 mm) and .300 Winchester Magnum (7.62 x 67 mm). A .408 caliber weapon was used to shoot at a record distance. Shooting was carried out at a target one meter wide and one meter high.

The length of the rifle is 1430 millimeters with a barrel length of 900 millimeters. The rifle is equipped with a longitudinally sliding bolt. The mass of SVLK-14S is 9.6 kilograms. The accuracy of fire from a rifle is 0.3 arc minutes.

The previous world record for accurate shot range was set by the American M300 sniper rifle. It was 4157 meters. Meanwhile, in June 2017, a Canadian sniper set the record for a confirmed successful accurate shot made in combat conditions. Using a 12.7 mm TAC-50 rifle, a Canadian in Iraq killed a militant at a distance of 3540 meters.

Correction: Initially, the news stated that the SVLK-14S sniper rifle is equipped with a five-round magazine. In fact, another rifle of this family, the SVLK-14M, is equipped with such a magazine. The SVLK-14S was deliberately left single-shot by the developers to maintain maximum accuracy and firing range. We apologize to the readers.

Vasily Sychev