Can You Really Make a Gun That Shoots Around Corners or Bullets That Curve in Flight?

In the 2008 film Wanted, mild-mannered office worker Wesley Gibson, played by James McAvoy, is inducted into a secret group of elite assassins known as The Fraternity, who keep the world in balance by eliminating those who threaten its safety. Among the superhuman skills Wesley learns is the ability to “curve” bullets by swinging his pistol as he fires, allowing him to hit targets hidden behind obstacles. While this makes for an awesome cinematic visual, is it actually possible to do this? Can you actually curve a bullet like a pitcher curves a baseball? The short answer is no - at least, not in the way shown in Wanted, but there is a caveat we’ll get to in a bit. But for now, the reason has to do with plain old inertia. When an object is set in motion, it will travel in a straight line unless some force acts upon it. Thus, no matter how fast you swing your gun while firing, the bullet will fly in the same direction it was travelling the moment it left the barrel. Once in free flight, there are only two major forces that can affect a bullet’s trajectory: gravity and air resistance. Gravity, of course, pulls the bullet towards the centre of the earth, causing it to travel in a downward-arcing trajectory. Wind resistance, however - specifically from a crosswind - can cause a bullet’s trajectory to curve sideways. This is called windage, and the sights of nearly all rifles are designed to be adjustable to compensate for this effect. However, due to the high density, small surface area, and high velocity of most bullets, windage is only significant over long distances and would be useless for curving a bullet around, say, Angelina Jolie. Similarly, another force that can affect bullets - at least, modern, spin-stabilized ones - is the Magnus Effect, the same aerodynamic phenomenon causes golf balls to “slice”, baseballs to curve, and soccer balls (football to our non-American viewers) to “bend” into the net. However, for a cylindrical bullet spinning around its longitudinal axis, the Magnus Effect acts either upwards or downwards - not sideways. To achieve a sideways curve, a gun would need to fire a spherical projectile spinning around its vertical axis - but again, so high are the inertial forces compared to the aerodynamic forces acting on a bullet that this curve would be very gradual and only become apparent over long ranges. To make the curve more pronounced at short range, you must make the projectile much larger and far less dense - creating, essentially, a nerf gun. Of course, there is a third way to make a bullet curve in flight: the Coriolis effect. Known to most people as the phenomenon that apparently makes toilets flush a different direction in the southern hemisphere (spoiler alert: no it doesn’t) in this case the Coriolis effect is the result of the earth rotating beneath a projectile as it flies, making it seem as though it is travelling along a curved trajectory. But once again, this effect only occurs over very long distances ... This is an abridged version of a video on our channel TodayIFoundOut which you can check out and subscribe to here:    / @todayifoundout