ammunition whose bullets emit light or smoke during flight
~16 min read
Tracer ammunition fired by United States military captured in a long-exposure photograph of a Japanese attack on Peleliu, 1944
Tracer ammunition, or tracers, are bullets or cannon-caliber projectiles that are built with a small pyrotechnic charge in their base. When fired, the pyrotechnic composition is ignited by the burning powder and burns very brightly, making the projectile trajectory visible to the naked eye during daylight, and very bright during nighttime firing. This allows the shooter to visually trace the trajectory of the projectile and thus make necessary ballistic corrections, without having to confirm projectile impacts and without even using the sights of the weapon. Tracer fire can also be used as a marking tool to signal other shooters to concentrate their fire on a particular target during battle.
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Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).