Reddit reviews Modern Exterior Ballistics: The Launch and Flight Dynamics of Symmetric Projectiles
We found 3 Reddit comments about Modern Exterior Ballistics: The Launch and Flight Dynamics of Symmetric Projectiles. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
I consider this required reading for external ballistics: Applied Ballistics For Long-Range Shooting by Bryan Litz.
For beginners, this book will give you a very gentle and fairly comprehensive introduction to what's up with external ballistics, without any complicated math getting in the way. I can guarantee it will make you a smarter rifle shooter.
If you need more comprehensive mathematical details for external ballistics: Modern Exterior Ballistics by Robert McCoy. Beware that he passed away before final corrections could be made. There is a free pdf of errata available online somewhere. Apparently this is the second edition, which includes the corrections. Unfortunately, I only have the first edition, so I cannot confirm that. Also beware, you need some college level math skills for this book. If you have an engineering background then this is a good book for you. If not, then you'll likely have a hard time comprehending it. The basic integration method uses an Euler predictor with an iterative Heun predictor corrector. If that last sentence makes any sense to you, then you'll be able to understand this book ;)
The fundamental text on the subject would be McCoy's Modern Exterior Ballistics. That isn't cheap, so you could check out the original paper that laid the basis for the common point mass model used in most ballistic solvers. This Master's thesis also has a great deal of useful information. Depending on whether or not you have access to various journals, there are some interesting papers on various approaches to piece-wise linearization of the equations, which saves the trouble of needing an RK4 or similar method for the solution of PDEs. [Kalil, 2015](http://ascelibrary.org/doi/abs/10.1061/ASCE AS.1943-5525.0000381) and Hainz, 2005 are worth a look.
Many of the formulas can be found in the books:
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However it used to take about 3 months to do a full ballistic calculation. The first computer ever (ENIAC) was designed to combat this. Reducing the time to about 3 days. Now your cell phone can do it in about 1 second. I would suggest using an app like ours to perform the calculations for you.