lefthandwingman:

My coworker is gun obsessed and she was telling me about snipers and how exceedingly rare it is for someone to be a successful sniper. Of course my mind immediately applied these random tid bits to Bucky Barnes.

As most of you may have already known there’s this thing called the coriolis effect. Basically, a long distance target, even if completely still, is technically a ‘moving target’ because the earth is rotating while the bullet is maintaining a relatively straight path. Thus, when shooting over 1000 yards (.56 miles) this needs to be factored in. (I’m not even going to go into spin drift: the rotating motion of the barrel of the gun).

Out to 1000 yards you could have nearly a full minute of correction because of coriolis effect depending on which direction you are shooting. Ie if you are shooting East your target is going to be dropping. If you are shooting towards the West your target is going to rotate up.

So, now-a-days we have automatic calculators for figuring out the coriolis effect quickly and accurately. Long distance shooters use daily updated data to build a drop chart or ballistic compensations. But, back when Bucky was a sniper they still used the mathematical formula for the coriolis effect to position their shots accurately. Bucky would have needed to know the relative motion of the object, the motion of the earth, and the latitude he was shooting from (as well as wind speeds etc) and then he would have had to compensate each shot almost to the tee in order to hit his targets.

Here’s the vector formula for the impact of the coriolis effect:

Bucky had to calculate this every time he positioned himself from his sniping position. In our fictitious MCU there is probably a tiny notebook floating around with Bucky’s scribbled equations. 

If this doesn’t prove Bucky’s a fucking brainiac I don’t know what does.