Affects of rotation of the earth when shooting a gun?

Answer 1

if you are riding in a car and you toss up a Baseball, the baseball will come right back down no matter how fast the car is going. The same thing applies to the bullet, the earth adds velocity to the bullet. The difference is that the earth is not moving at the same speed everywhere. Near the poles, the earth's tangential rotational speed is pretty small compared to its speed near the equator. So if you were to fire a very large gun from the equator northward, the bullet will be in the air for a significant period of time. In that amount of time, the earth may rotate, say, 15o. The source will have moved nearly 1700 kilometers in that time. if the bullet lands at the 60th parallel, the destination point will have moved only half as much- nearly 850 kilometers. To a spy satellite rotating with the earth (in geosynchronous orbit), this would seem just normal, but if you were to map the path of the bullet on a 2-dimensional (flat) map of the earth, it would look very strange, as if an "invisible force" were acting on that bullet. This phenomenon is called the Coriolis Effect. One of the biggest practical applications of the Coriolis Effect occured during WWI, when the Germas attempted to use the Paris Gun, which had a range of 75 miles.

Answer 2

The rotation of the Earth has a negligible effect on a bullet fired from a gun. While the Earth rotates at a speed of around 1670 kilometers per hour (1037 miles per hour) at the equator, bullets travel at much higher speeds. Typically, bullets travel at speeds of several hundred to a few thousand kilometers per hour, making the influence of the Earth's rotation on their trajectory insignificant.