Take the ak for exemple, the front sight is like 4 centimeters above the barrel, how is that accurate? Do you just have to compensate for that? Also aplies to scopes, some of the sight quite high on the gun
Edit: i already know they make arcs because of gravity and the angle of the barrel
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A bullet follows an arced path because of gravity. If you shoot it parallel to the ground, it will just arc downwards. But we mount a scope 5 cm above the center line of the barrel. Then we shoot at a target say 100m away. We adjust the scope until the bullets hit at the center of the crosshairs on the scope, but what this really means is we’re aiming the gun upwards a little bit to meet that point.
So now the bullet has a different trajectory. It goes upwards (because we’re aiming a little up) until will hit exactly what the scope is aiming at, at 100m.
What about the rest of the distances? They make calculators for that. Based on the scope height, bullet velocity, size, and aerodynamics, it will tell you exactly how high or low the bullet will be at any one distance.
But overall, I sight my varmint rifle at 100m (actually yards). I know that my bullet will hit a little low at anything under that. But I never shoot closer than 50, so I’m only worried about being low by maybe 1-2 centimeters if I shoot right at the crosshairs. That’s good enough for my purposes, but I can aim a centimeter low if I want. I know my bullet will be higher from about 100-200 yards, so I know to aim down a touch if I go out that far. Now if I were shooting out to 400 yards or more, I would have to be very careful about my range and adjust accordingly because the bullet is dropping rather quickly at that point, so my range estimation being short by say 50 meters can mean the bullet will hit several centimeters below where I wanted it to and I’d probably hit the ground in front of my target.
At this point the scope height doesn’t mean much because the bullet is introducing far more of an elevation change.
But if you’re doing very careful target shooting, you know all of the bullet heights at distances above, and you adjust your scope up or down accordingly. You may even have a scope that has that bullet’s path effectively programmed into it (electronic or just the markings calibrated for that bullet), so all you have to do is set distance.
And sometimes you need sights far above the barrel because you’re shooting a slow bullet at long range, which means lots of drop, so you need to tilt the barrel way up. For very low sights, this would mean the barrel is obscuring the target. So you make [really tall sights like this](https://www.theboxotruth.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/e14-1.jpg). The rear sight has a sliding aperture. It goes up and down depending on the range, which means you’ll have a different tilt to the rifle to put it on target. Ranges are marked into the bar it’s sitting on based on a specific bullet used. The photo above has it set to a fairly short distance.
That kind of thing was pretty easy for military rifles because everyone was using the same issued bullet. So they just etched the markings into the sights according to the arc of that one bullet.
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