Question: Whats your favourite fact about the weapons that you keep running?

Emma Bould answered on 16 Mar 2012:

Ok, my favourite fact that I can share with you is about something called Base Bleed (there are some great pictures at this link: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Base_bleed_shell_NT.PNG)

Basically it’s how we make a rounds go further (if you look at my profile you can see a picture of us practicing to fire our medium range gun). Base bleed is basically like filling up a low pressure area behind a round (because it is travelling really fast) to make it have less drag through the air. With less drag, it loses less of it’s energy to friction and therefore travels further.

There is a bit more too it than that, however there is an excellent explanation of the concept on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_bleed