The first post ever published on this site said, in its entirety:
Migration is in progress.
That was a while ago. The migration is over. Here is what came out of it.
geladen.ch ballistics — a client-side suite for small-arms external ballistics. Trajectory, hit probability, drag curves, your rifles and your bullets, a field solver, and a manual that actually explains things. Everything runs in your browser. Nothing is ever transmitted anywhere, because there is nowhere to transmit it to.
Current release 3.6.x, codename SMARTASS — System of Modeling & Analytics for Range, Trajectory, Accuracy & Shot Success. The previous one was HARDASS, and the previous ones were… Yes, the acronym comes first and the words are back-filled. This is a serious project.
Where the old calculators went
For the old boys who have had these bookmarked for years — the three tools that lived under Ballistics → Calculators are all in there now:
- Plan 33 → Trajectory and Hit Probability. Same idea, with a full 4DOF Modified Point Mass engine underneath when you ask for it, and the hit-probability side has grown up considerably: real targets with real scoring zones, wind and range-estimation uncertainty, your own dispersion. The same sobering hello from reality. The smallest group at 100 m is still not the deciding factor.
- TARAN → the Rifle Precision Calculator. Photograph your targets, mark the impacts on the photo, and get the statistics across as many targets and groups as you care to shoot. Still the most controversial, offensive, ego-shattering, pride-wounding, humiliating, demoralizing and butthurt-inducing piece of software I have ever written. It also no longer requires me to admit in public that its code was my first encounter with CSS and JavaScript and came out a spaghetti disaster, blood-from-the-eyes even by my — ahem — lax standards. That code is gone. You’re welcome.
- Labrabaco → BC tools and the Cd–Mach curve builder. Back then the honest summary was “yes, it seems possible; no, I don’t yet know how accurate it is.” I know now. It’s good.
The old pages stay exactly where they are. I don’t break other people’s bookmarks. But they’re the old ones — worse math, worse units, and rendering like it’s 2009. The work happens in the new suite now.
And one tool is not a port of anything. Building this platform finally gave me the occasion to write the Range Solver I have wanted for years and never had a good enough reason to sit down and do. The development was driven by things I don’t want: I don’t want to click around 10 screens to get together the inputs necessary for 1 shot. I don’t want to see 50 outputs in very small font all over the place in all possible units for all possible values, including a reminder about my wife’s birthday, the fun fact of the day, and the prices at the nearest gas station. I just want two numbers: elevation and windage — big, visible in bright sunlight. So 2 principles were driving the development: (1) absolutely no unnecessary information on the screen, and (2) all necessary information for a shot — inputs and outputs — highly visible on one single screen, no clicking around. Judging by the market of commercial solvers, not many people (except maybe Lapua) seem to share these design ideas — so I’ll probably be the only one using it.
Also, I don’t want to spend time sketching the range on a paper notepad — I’m no bloody artist, I’m an engineer, I lost the ancient art of writing by hand decades ago, so here’s a unique feature: take a photo from shooting position, mark targets, pick targets from the photo, save it for the next time.
That one I built for myself, selfishly and with great satisfaction. Everything else here I would have written anyway; this is the one I had simply been putting off.
Why any of this exists
JBM Ballistics was, for years, the reference: archaic units, Web 1.0 interface, and a pile of genuinely correct tools that everyone in this hobby used and nobody thought to back up. Then Mr. Millard pulled almost all of it offline in one afternoon. BC calculators, stability, danger zone — gone.
I won’t speculate about his reasons. I will say I was energetically pissed off, and that somebody finally had to get off their arse and fill the void.
So: every ballistic tool I’d written over the years to scratch my own itches, plus rewrites of the ones from JBM’s I missed most, cleaned up, put into honest metre-kilogram-second units internally, and consolidated into one app. Done right, with my personal definition of “done right.”
Since the mission statement of this site has always been to break the myth that shooting far is complicated: the suite does the complicated part, and does it properly. When I put an actual physics-based spin-drift model next to the old empirical formula and checked both against modern Doppler data, the empirical one was off by about 80% on average and the physical one by under 10%. Both are still in there — you pick, in Settings — but now you know which one to pick.
The boring part, stated plainly
It’s free, and it always will be. There are no paid features and there never will be any. No “pro” tier, no unlock, no account to create, no email address, no “sign up free to continue”, no subscription for the privilege of a Coriolis term, or an 801 meter-long curve. Nobody is monetising your dope card.
I collect absolutely no data. Nothing is ever transmitted to a server. Not “anonymised”, not “only to improve your experience”. None. There is no server — it’s static files and your browser, and I could not see your precious little rifles und ammunition even if I very badly wanted to. That’s not a privacy policy somebody can quietly amend next year; it’s the architecture. Source is public, go look.
It installs as a real app on Android, iPhone and desktop, and works fully offline once loaded. No signal at the range has never been a problem and still isn’t.
Five languages. AGPL-3.0. Some tools are finished, some are partial, one is “planned”, which is developer for it exists as a line in my todo file. This is one man alone with an autistic monomania a hobby — not, pardon my French, a marketing department with, pardon my French, a roadmap.
Full disclosure
Since I declare my conflicts of interest in everything else I write here: there are none. Nobody sponsors this, nothing is affiliate-linked, no manufacturer sent me anything, and so far I earned exactly zero francs from it.
The GUI, incidentally, was written almost entirely by an AI, because I hate DOM and CSS with a passion I normally reserve for MOA, and left to myself I would never have gotten round to it. Fair division of labour: the machine does the stupid shit, I do the part that requires knowing what a drag coefficient is.
Thanks
The singular pronouns above are misleading. This is not a one-man achievement, and I would like to be precise about that.
Check the app’s official Thanks page, and it is worth reading in its own right.
If you find a bug, please tell me. A good bug report is a gift, and it gets credited by name in the release notes — as a look through them will show.
Behave yourselves while I’m away. I’ll be checking.