This is a still from a video showing a shooter’s participation in an exercise in cold, apparently high humidity weather. He had fired multiple rounds by this time and the vapor coming off the suppressor had gotten to the point that it interfered with his ability to see the target. I’m curious whether anyone has seen something similar, and if so, what caused it.

The answer would be obvious if it were raining or snowing and liquid water was contacting the hot can, but could it happen without precipitation if the atmosphere is just cold and foggy? Comments?




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL5MgrDsJSQ

My understanding is it's the hot air rising off the can and quickly condensing when it hits the cold air. Higher humidity in the air of course will make this effect pronounced.

Timely thread. My NV group has a whole squad we've taken up at a PCSL 1 Gun NV match this weekend.

I tend to enjoy nerding out about the lunar phase and weather stuff before we go out on night events. What follows may be a little uninteresting to some, but it paints a picture for me, so I guess bear with me.

Current forecast for the match is currently 90% probability of precipitation, 54% probability of thunderstorms, 63-90% humidity (depending on the time and the source I check), and a dew point in the mid 60's. Waning gibbous at 68%, but moonrise isn't until a half hour after the hard stop at this facility, and at, it's to the northeast behind the mountain range that is the backstop. So, it'll be pretty dark overall, but the stadium lights in the parking lot will be on, backlighting us.

We're basically all of us shooting suppressed rifles or subguns. I think the only guys who aren't are shooting handgun and thinking about switching to their suppressed rifles anyway because they have open emitter optics on their handguns.

So, we should be in fairly prime conditions to replicate what's going on in the OP with a variety of cans, from traditional high backpressure style to the most modern 3D printed titanium stuff on the market, and not only that, we'll be recording through NV both in first person and third person. We're going to get to see the effect of this with IR lights and lasers and potentially also white light weaponlights. May be raining on a given stage, may not be, but it'll be cold and humid either way. I fully expect we'll see lot of additional visual signature in the way of vapor clouds just based on my experiences of a couple decades lived split between the SeaTac area and the St. Lawrence river valley and all that cold and damp weather. I'll report back afterwards.

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:
This is a still from a video showing a shooter’s participation in an exercise in cold, apparently high humidity weather. He had fired multiple rounds by this time and the vapor coming off the suppressor had gotten to the point that it interfered with his ability to see the target.

Assuming I caught the audio correctly, he felt the suppressor cover had moisture in it. Which means the can was boiling the water in the suppressor cover. I saw this occur at a 2-rifle match a few years ago, when the first day day of the match had a few inches of snow on the ground. As the temps warmed during the morning, lots of snow fell from the trees onto people, packs, and rifles. I didn't see such a significant amount of steam on other competitors' rifles, but it did occur. Shooting without the suppressor cover should have eliminated the steam that day.

quote:

Originally posted by fritz:
Assuming I caught the audio correctly, he felt the suppressor cover had moisture in it.

Regardless of any other possible causes, and I appreciate the discussion, that would certainly do it. I should have paid more attention to the video.