Ok, after playing a bit of counterstrike a mate and I get into a heated debate about bipods and if they affect recoil. He says that bipods would reduce recoil due to the vibrations going into the ground, citing that shooting from the hip is less accurate than using a bipod. I’m saying that physics in my limited understanding of newton goes that each action has an equal and opposite reaction. So with the bullet getting fired the opposite reaction goes into the shoulder having nothing to do with the barrel and thus the bipod if deployed.
It’s a bit more complicated. You have to consider the design of the stock and the flash suppressor. If you look at the stock of an M16, you can draw a straight line from the flash suppressor, through the barrel, bolt assembly, and recoil buffer, to the butt of the stock. That helps prevent muzzle rise.
Does the bipod allow the recoil to go straight back, as opposed to at an accuracy-affecting angle, as would be the case if you’re hold the rifle with your arms in an asymmetrical fashion?
Anything you attach to the gun, including a bipod, will reduce the recoil, because it will increase the mass of the gun. Force equals mass times acceleration. The force pushing the relatively light bullet out of the muzzle at a very high rate of acceleration has an equal but opposite force pushing the relatively heavy gun into the shooter’s shoulder. If the gun is made heavier, the acceleration of the gun into your shoulder is reduced.
Take a 30lbs machine gun, say the M240. Hold it with two hands and pull - it moves, right? Take that gun, unfold the bipod, go prone, set it up, aim and pull - it moves, but it’s harder to move because of the friction of the bipod on the ground. Now if the ground is really soft it will be even harder to move. Now, when you fire, the friction/resistance is going to work against recoil, so yes, a machine gun on the ground will have less recoil than one you hold up.
That’s just wrong, and it has nothing to do with recoil. Firing from the hip is innacurate because you’re not, you know, aiming; while firing from a bipod is more accurate than just from the shoulder - standing or lying down - because the weapon is resting on terra firma, instead of on far less firm bone and muscle.
When firing a bipod mounted machine gun, the firer digs the bipod into the ground and then leans forward into the gun. This helps hold the gun in a firmer position and reduces the effects of the recoil on automatic fire.
I regularly shoot my FAL in the prone position. Sometimes I use a bipod. But most of the time I use my left arm to support the rifle and an M1907 sling to eliminate muscle fatigue. I have never noticed any difference in recoil.
The sling won’t hold off fatigue indefinitely, though. If you’d been in that prone position for an hour or more, waiting for Charlie to pop up out of his tunnel, the bipod will help quite a bit.
One of the tests people in the US sometimes use when they buy a second hand military surplus firearms is the “tyre test”, in which a rifle is sandbagged onto a tyre, a round is loaded into the breech, and it is fired by means of a VERY long piece of string (so if the gun blows up, no-one gets injured).
The gun still kicks, even though no-one’s holding it.
And before anyone tries to claim “Whoosh!”, I put this in the same category as “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” questions. Bart Simpson came up with the logical answer, despited what learned Zen Masters might feel to the contrary.
