How far can a ball travel?

[Adui]

How about; Just far enough to make you regret it if you discharge the weapon negligently.

 

[zimmerstutzen]

Without getting into artillery, and just sticking to muzzle loaders with round balls, the limiting effect of air resistance is pretty substantial. As velocity decreases and the effect of gravity pulls to earth, there is certainly a parabolic curve. When a hunter stands and shoots level with the gun being approximately 5 feet above the ground. The ball hits the ground when it has dropped 60 inches. Velocity in general for a 50 caliber ball drops to about 50% by 100 yds. (slightly more decrease for initial velocity above the speed of sound) The time of flight is one factor but gravity also accelerates the speed of the fall. If a ball takes .54 seconds to fall that 5 ft. (According to "splat calculator") The initial velocity per second times that fraction of a second to fall, will be further than the distance traveled to ground strike. At 1,000 ft per second, ground strike will be before the ball has traveled 540 ft. At 2,000 ft per second ground strike will occur before 1,080 ft. There are ways to factor in the air resistance to see how far short of those marks ground strike will occur. According to the Lyman Black powder handbook, First Ed, a .495 ball fired AT 1,000 fps, drops 60 inches just past the 150 yd mark (450 ft) At 2,000 fps initial velocity ground strike occurs just past 225 yds (675 ft) This is for shooting level on level ground. We can add in elevation, but it does not add significantly more distance for hunting type shooting where the bullet path is only a few inches above the sight line (MRT) Even fired at 2,000 fps, at 300 yds the ball drop would be 131 inches. Just under 11 ft. of drop. Shooting at a target 3 ft off the ground at 300 yds would require a trajectory of 14 ft above the line of sight. (velocity at that range has dropped to 612 fps.) Time to reach that point is .959 seconds. The same ball fired at an intial 1,000 fps, at 300 yds has dropped to 441 fps and it took 1.41 seconds to get there. In addition the drop is 303 inches. (25+ ft) Quite a rainbow. I have shot round ball sillywets at 300 yds. Not only was it a matter of lobbing the balls in there like a mortar, the 50 caliber balls had lost so much energy, they couldn't knock over the heavy metal targets. I switched to a 54 lyman GPR and could get them.