Tbh i dont fully understand the Coriolis Effect either, i only understand that it makes wind blow in different directions depending on your latitude but i dont know why.
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Yes. In fact, it would affect the bullet trajectory even in a vacuum.
Suppose you’re standing at the equator, where the Earth is rotating at a speed of about 1,700 km/h. You, your gun, the bullet in your gun, and anything else at rest with respect to the ground are rotating along with it. You fire your gun away from the equator – let’s say northward – and let’s imagine for the sake of clarity that your bullet is traveling over a big fraction of the Earth. The movement of your bullet relative to an observer floating above (but not rotating along with) the Earth has an east-west component of 1,700 km/h eastward, and a north-south component of <whatever the bullet’s speed is> northward.
When your bullet reaches 30 degrees latitude, traveling northward along the Earth’s surface, it’s now over land that is rotating more slowly. Why? Because it has less ground to cover. The higher your latitude, the smaller of a circle you have to traverse in 24 hours (or more properly, 23 hours and 56 minutes, but that’s another thread) to go around once. At 30 degrees latitude, the distance is cos(30 degrees) = sqrt(3)/2 = about 70% the speed it is at the equator. Now the ground is moving eastward at ~1,200 km/h eastward relative to our floating-but-not-co-rotating observer. **But your bullet is still moving at 1,700 km/h eastward** – why wouldn’t it be? Nothing acted to change its movement.
Thus, **relative to the ground**, your bullet would now be traveling eastward at 500 km/h. This is the Coriolis effect: it’s a consequence of things moving from a part of the Earth that is rotating more quickly to a part that is rotating less quickly or vice-versa. It has nothing, directly, to do with the air, although the Coriolis effect *on* air is quite important to Earth’s weather.
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