[dctoedt]

> hull damage being caused or not caused by a rifle being fired from the flight deck of a ship

How did that happen? Our MarDet would occasionally do live-fire training off the flight deck (CVN-65); they naturally pointed their weapons away from the ship ....

Or are you talking about hitting the hull of a different ship, e.g., one of the tin cans in plane guard, or alongside during an UNREP? Seems like that would ... get noticed by a lot of folks.

[RandomThoughts3]

Hypothetically, someone could have left a guest (like say an engineer from the shipyard doing sea acceptance testing) fire a rifle and an unlucky wave reflection might have bounced a round back towards the bow.

[rtkwe]

Wow what an incredibly unfortunate hypothetical situation. 1 in a million ricochet that one.

[KennyBlanken]

Draw a ship. Draw some waves. Note the angle from Crayon Eater those waves.

Also note how wide an angle "ship hull" represents both vertically and horizontally.

Not so 1 in a million.

[Dylan16807]

Sure, if it bounces that's a very big angle.

But what's the chance of a bullet that hits water bouncing back the other way at high speed? I would have thought it was zero!

[Breza]

Would love to see someone fire a Phalanx for four hours just to generate enough test data to assess that probability

[edm0nd]

Seabees doing seabee things.

[dublinth]

"A wave? At sea? Chance in a million."