[2019] How to "Make Snipers Snipe"

Originally posted by azenuquerna

Hey folks,

I saw /u/habean's thread on snipers about two weeks after the discussion had ended, but wanted to contribute what I've found via testing that is one of the primary contributing factors to the difficulty of long-range shooting in EFT.

The main difficulty right now is handling the very exaggerated bullet drop at extended ranges. (It's exacerbated by the issues we have with how zeroing/FOV interacts, but separate note on that later.) The cause of that bullet drop is not an issue with the muzzle velocity itself, but rather the drag model that is being used (though this assumes that gravity is not totally wrong).

IRL, bullets have a measured ballistic coefficient (BC), which expresses how much more drag they suffer than compared to a standard reference bullet. The two primary reference bullets that are commonly used today are G1 and G7. As an example, the .308 175 grain Sierra MatchKing (175gr SMK) bullet has a BC of 0.496 G1 and 0.252 G7 (i.e., 0.496x and 0.252x the drag resistance of the G1 and G7 reference bullets).

Correctly modeled, this means that a 175gr SMK at 880m/s muzzle velocity should slow down to 660 m/s and drop 27" (~70cm) at 400m, taking 0.48 seconds to travel that distance (~30 frames at 60fps).

In Tarkov, the drag model is incredibly aggressive and slows down bullets much faster than it should, and it appears to treat all bullets identically. At 400m that same 175gr SMK with Tarkov's drag model applied slows down to 300 m/s, drops 65", and takes 0.75 seconds (45 frames at 60 fps) to travel. (If you care about the raw numbers, EFT appears to be using a BC of 0.07 G7 / 0.14 G1)

This is what the trajectories look like laid on top of each other:

• http://www.shooterscalculator.com/images/trajectory/ballistic_trajectories_chart_1b3c068d.png

Separately, due to the fact that higher FOVs move the camera closer to the optic when ADSing, playing at a high FOV means both that the in-game zeroing is wrong (e.g., a 100m zero is closer to 200m-300m) and the scaling on BDC reticles (if they're not already scaled wrong like the HAMR, Bravo4, TA11 ACOG, etc.) is distorted, though they're already pretty much irrelevant as the ballistics that they are meant for don't exist. As such, all of my testing was done at 50 FoV to confirm most of these data points.

Tl;dr - Tarkov makes bullets way too fat and they slow down way too fast.