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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

I don't know that much about sniper rifles. Can you not leave a muzzle flash? Is that possible (with flashless powder or something)? And if you do, what are the trade-offs?

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_suppressor

But a flash in the middle of the day would not be very visible anyway.

It's not very noticeable in daylight from a distance in the first place, plus you would shoot from inside a room which would all but completely hide it.

(The whole idea seems a bit crazy too, there are a thousand things which can go wrong with a rocket, so let's look for snipers.)

> (The whole idea seems a bit crazy too, there are a thousand things which can go wrong with a rocket, so let's look for snipers.)

If I didn't know any better, I'd say some guy who both roasted his brain with drugs and spends a lot of time in the company of a person who was sniped at is in charge of the company.

…you realize this happened nine years ago, right?

This is the first time I’ve heard of this incident and I’m not ashamed to admit that with everything we now know about Musk, it seems totally plausible that he would have internally squashed any other theories.

He has convinced his shareholders that FSD will ship by the end of every year for the past decade, so why wouldn’t he believe he could convince the FBI that the only way his super fueling process could have gone wrong is via an action movie sniper plot?

I think you're going a bit too far. The article doesn't say that he internally squashed any other theories. Their investigation successfully found the real issue.

I mean a competitor shooting from their own property is just comical corporate sabotage too considering we're dealing with rocket scientists here.

There are a thousand things that can go wrong when the Rocket is doing things.

It exploding while just sitting there doing nothing narrows the possibilities 99.9%.

Things happen while sitting, fuelling etc. But this rocket was in the air when it exploded IIRC.

What? Amos-6 blew up on the launch pad. The article headline picture shows it on the pad.

Silencers can reduce or even entirely eliminate muzzle flash.

Yup. Definitely won’t suppress the supersonic crack from any projectile able to deliver useful energy at that range though.

Suppressors only reduce the loudness of the muzzle blast without impacting the projectile's ability to break the sonic barrier. In fact, suppressors slightly increase projectile speed because they effectively add barrel length.

First part - that’s what I said?

Second part - no suppressor I’ve ever seen or used did that, they all did the opposite.

wasn't there a rocket launch going on at the time the shot was fired?

Sniper rifles have longer barrels that both suppress barrel flash and increase muzzle velocity - thus making the rifle more accurate at longer distances. They also fire larger rounds with larger cartridges to get even greater muzzle velocity. The trade-off is size and weight. Longer barrels, larger rounds, bigger cartridges - that increases the size and weight of the weapon and its ammunition. That's size and weight an infantry neither needs nor wants.

The Boer's during the Boer war were able to using a sniping attack against the British because they had smokeless gunpowder, so I would imagine flashless is also an advantage. I remember seeing artillery and tanks having something on the end of the barrel that diverts the flame to the sides.

The thing on a tank is called a “muzzle brake” and it greatly reduces felt recoil. Also available on many smaller guns.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzzle_brake

I mean it's pretty easy to hide the flash. Said flash is just burning powder after it leaves the barrel. So if you have an expansion chamber after the barrel it will be contained. Silencers do this secondarily with the first order effect of reducing the noise. An empty silencer (no baffles) will still hide the majority if not all the flash.

Also, flash hiders are quite effective.

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