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Tactics Tracer Bullets

Tracers are used to give the shooter a reference to where his shots are going, usually they fall on every 5th shot. They are just bullets with a bit of magnesium on the end so when they are shot the magnesium ignites and you see a streak of light. And yes, in real life it looks almost like a laser because of how fast it is moving.
 
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Except for the fact that real lasers don't look like that at all... if anything it's "Star Wars"-style lasers/"blasters" that look like wwII tracers.

And as has been mentioned in the wikipedia article, tracers are not made with "a bit of magnesium at the end" (that would give a white flame, and probably wouldn't have the right incendiary qualities). They're made a hollow base filled with a mix of some metal fuel (magnesium perclorate is mentioned, but I'm sure there are other possibilities) and different salts. This is the same technique that is used in fireworks. Depending on which salts you're using, you get different coloured flames. Strontium for red tracers, barium for green. I'm not sure what the yellow tracers used by the germans used, but I'd hazard a guess at sodium.

In real life, gunners would often take the time to mix tracers and common rounds in their ammo belts for their personal preferences, so there's no point in saying "one tracers in x rounds is the correct amount", because it varies with availability of tracers, and the mission for which the gun is intended. RO uses a figure of 1 in 5 rounds, which is quite okay in my opinion for infantry combat.
 
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I would assume the trajectory is different. Certainly the riqouchets(sp???) are behaving in different ways. The bullet has little weight after all the "tracer fuel" has been expended, and that is quite accurately portrayed in the way the bullets seem to fly of in all sorts of directions once they hit something.
 
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The tracer element (as noted, a small amount of magnesium) is pretty small, and the projectile still has a hefty lead core. Only slightly less than the regular "ball" ammo, however. Point of impact at most battlefield ranges is pretty much the same. They are quite visible in daylight, though not as bright as the ones modelled in game.
The pretty-accurate ricochet effect is due to the bullet giving up much of it's energy on impact, and also distorting. In any live-fire situation, you can see a certain percentage of slugs going every which way.

There's a show that makes the rounds on the Military channel called "Gun Camera". Shows gun-camera footage from all sorts of aircraft from several wars. On WWII strafing runs at German ground targets, you can clearly see the .50 tracers enter the ground and pop back out again, whizzing off in odd directions.
 
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