shaggy2

@scout  I dont disagree with you. I dont know enough about it to say what types or thickness of armour the 50 cal. slap round can penatrate. But i can tell you one thing you are not going to use a slow firing heavy sniper rifle to take targets from close range, when you as a sniper will more than likely have a personal side arm....not that anyone will get close enough to you that you would have to use it. (personally if i had an M82A1/2 with a ten round box magazine i definatly would not waste my ammo on anything less than an officer,and i would definatly not reveal my position if they were close enough to return fire)

@ deadman.... Â If you can give me some proof of your statement then i will believe you, but i saw a marine sniper instructor state straight out that there are types of rounds for the m82a2 that can penatrate light to medium armour. Also i think people misunderstood me, i never once said that you couldn't fire a 0.5 round at a human being, just that it wasnt economical, in war time, with a few exceptions. If you cant fire a 0.5 round at a human being than why can you drop napalm on them, or anti-personel bomblets. Who ever said we cant use a nifty fifty on a human being is stupid. I would say that this sniper rifle was designed for light armoured targets and assasinations from long distance. I know if you kill an officer with a fifty from any distance and his head disapears in a puff of red smoke chances are his buddies will surrender.

has it ever occured to any of you that the military, may not always try and kill a target with one shot, a .50 round from the m82a1/2 would put a big enough hole in any one that they would die almost in an instant, weather the bullet killed them or they bled to death, But that is not the point since war is a lot more cruel than you might think. Why do you think they use fmj bullets as standard issue, besides the obvious fmj pass through the body not causing as much damage as say a hollow point, thus wounding your enemy and causing your enemy to use extra resources in retrieving and treating that wounded soldier, just killing your enemy in one shot is easy, we have the guns to do it, but if you wound one others have to help and this gives you the opportunity to wound many others, no one is going to waste time to rescue a corpse on a battle field while fighting is going on, but if some one is screaming in agony, well you get the point...someone put a post of a web site in this thread that had a marine corp sniper training video it was pretty decent, they mention 4 types of ammo for the M82a1 and 2 of the 4 could penetrate light armour and one of them called a slap round could penatrate medium armour and explode the trainer never mentioned the gun was used on human targets probably because of the reason i stated above, unless you mean a specific target that you absolutly had to kill in one shot, you would probably not use the m82a1.