Thread: Downhill shot

Originally Posted by Moa Hunter

Calculators aside, how can that be, a bullet surely must have an advantage going downhill as opposed to up. A bullet not shot but dropped from the top of a cliff will accelerate to TV in free fall. A bullet is never going to fall upwards ( on earth) so the difference between the two is real

I struggled to wrap my head around it too because it does sound counter intuitive.

But the bullet is not being powered so the only forces are air resistance and gravity. Gravity will pull the bullet down at the same rate whether it's going uphill or downhill. Going up at say 100m/s means after 1s you're going up at 90m/s, and going down at -100m/s means after 1s you're going down at -110m/s. The difference in either case is -10m/s.