I find that claim Very hard to believe.
I don’t, given videos such as these. They show that it is possible to hit a small target at a very long distance. 4200 yds in that video, and they’ve since gone out to near 5000 yds. What I don’t believe is that the sniper did it in anything less than 10 shots, and maybe 20. I also think the spotter was “walking” the misses towards the target.
Making a bunch of assumptions but the bullet should be subsonic by then. 750 grain Amax in .50 does so around 2700 yds, if you likethe assumptions I’ve used (2800 FPS MV, hot day, zeroed for 300 yds.). 8 second or so time of flight, roughly 8000 inches of drop. (Which leads to another question, what sort of rig was the guy using that he could dial that much elevation into his setup?)
Anyway, if the targets are really oblivious, they may not have realized they were even being shot at. Still doesn’t answer why the snipers didn’t just call in arty or an air strike, or hell, get closer, but I don’t see that the shot is per se impossible, given a bunch of chances to hit the guy. Just really unlikely.
Only if your sights are perfectly parallel to your barrel. You don’t need to aim at a point 12 meters in the air; you just need to adjust your sights to the point where, at your target’s distance, the aim point is 10 meters below where the barrel is pointing.
As for adjusting for winds, the easy way to do it is the same way that the Canadian sniper did, by taking multiple shots and seeing where the first ones hit. It’s not perfect, because wind effects aren’t perfectly linear, and can change from moment to moment, but it’ll get you close enough to give luck a chance, and of course skill can compensate for the nonlinearities and variations, too.
Yeah, but that’s in Canadian. After the exchange rate it’s only like 1.6 miles.
On the contrary. Gravity’s a constant and distance is easy to ascertain - as **Chronos **said, from there it’s just a matter of adjusting sights. Wind and your quarry’s erratic movements, them’s the bitches.
I’ll admit I’ve never been a sniper or shot at such extreme ranges. But I saw a TV show once where they had a military sniper shooting at a target over a thousand yards away. And they showed how he had to aim his sight at a point about twenty feet above the target he was shooting at. Apparently he felt it was better to adjust his point of aim rather than adjust his sight.
Actually, they were demonstrating that while the barrel was pointed at a spot twenty feet up, the scope was pointed at the target.
Aside: I was starting to get skeptical of all of the talk of the Coriolis effect, so I decided to run some numbers. And it turns out that, assuming this range and a bullet speed of Mach 1, the Coriolis deflection comes out to of order 1 meter (2.6 meters if you’re at one of the poles, but that’s the most extreme possibility). And a 1-meter deflection is in fact significant, if you’re aiming for a person-sized target. So, yes, you do need to take Coriolis into account somehow.
Of course, he probably didn’t take it into account by doing the math: He probably just knows that for long ranges, his shots tend to deflect a bit to the right, and that it’s a bit more when he’s aiming north-south than when he’s aiming east-west. If he’s at all mathematically inclined, he’s probably also noticed that it’s quadratic with range, so that if he’s twice as far from the target, the deflection is four times as much (this is the same general form that droppage from gravity takes, so shouldn’t be too unfamiliar to a sniper). And even if you didn’t know any of that, it’d automatically get built into the process of walking one’s shots: If your first shot is 3 m to the right of the target, then you can aim your second for a point 3 m to the left of your target, without even knowing the reason why the first was off (though of course you’ll converge more quickly if you already took it into account for your first shot).
Sometimes, there is none to call, or its busy elsewhere on a more important / higher value target.
See avove.
Not EVER so easy as you might think. If nothing else, it takes time to move closer, in which time the target may be simply elsewhere. Or the intervening ground is occupied by the enemy. Or under enemy observation and fire. Or otherwise not easily passable. And maybe, just maybe, the observation point the sniper is occupying is ideal for surveying vast areas and shooting at any random enemy whom might go for a stroll, allowing a small team to dominate an enourmous volume of the battlespace - and they don’t want to give it up. Naaah.
See up-thread for discusion of odds, and breaking them.
When you consider the cost of an artillery shell or morter round, vs., say, 20 shots of match-grade ammunition, it’s still a LOT cheaper to use the sniper.
Ah, you’re a little bit blythe on that assumption. The Sniper doesn’t “just know,” and while they DO guess a fair bit, those guesses are based on sound grounding in the external ballistics, accumulated knowledge and, yes, math. There are quick-guide tables, and their DOPE* book, and yes, calculators. It’s a serious topic of classroom discussion when training snipers.
*Data on Personel Equipment: A book full of the known and oberseved performance for their equipment. Sniper equipment tends to be highly personalized, and it makes more sense for the shooter to build his own data than for the service to try and quantify every possible combination. They’ll know about each specific piece, but it’s up to the shooter to collect the data on his or her peronsal combinations of equipment.
By “doing the math”, I meant with the cosines and cross products and so on, which I’d be very surprised if the sniper did. He probably does have a table, though it might not list ranges this extreme, and so he’d have to extrapolate from what it did list. Or I suppose nowadays they might have an app that does it for them, though I’m sure they’d still have the paper tables as backup.
And even to the extent that it is just based on a gut sense of “a bit to the right”, the sniper’s gut sense of “a bit” is probably about as precise as most peoples’ tape measures.
Not so much as you might think: Meet the EXACTO: .50 caliber Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance.
Smart Phones for the win. Yes, there ARE Apps for that. 
The difference between a WAG, and a SWAG. 