What a tracer should look like (before spazzing just look).

[Heliocon]

Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt

Is your vision blurry when driving down the highway in an older car or a truck? Because there's all sorts of vibration in that one too

The amount of tissue in your body and the reflex motions of your eyeballs can dampen these vibrations out to the point that they are non-perceivable until the vibration gets really severe.


As for the topic at hand, i agree with Heliocon that making them slightly thinner and using lighting instead of geometry to give the impression of glow would make them just right, but i disagree that viewing them 90 degrees off to their line of travel would give off dots (unless one was very far away). At least that's my perception from personally firing 20mm rheinmetal AA guns while i was serving my conscription term in the local air force, the whole gun was shaking when i was watching others fire but when i was firing myself i was on the gun and didn't feel a thing, tracers didn't squiggle at all, etc. All i would see is thin lines of light that turned into small dots as they got about a kilometer or so away from me. I could estimate range from knowing the shell's maximum flight time (it has a self destruct fuse) and the amount of time it flew before it turned into a dot, so it was easy to make a rough calculation, eg "it turns into a dot 1/3rd of the way before it explodes, i know it explodes at 2km, so it's about 600-700 meters".

As for extra effects, there are ricochets modeled in CoD. Best way to see it is to have a steady firing platform with a battery of rapid firing guns: just crash land a 110 and let it rest with its nose low, then start firing those mg17s and the rounds will start impacting a few hundred yards off your nose, you can easily see the ricochets.

Sorry I might not have been clear with this. Watching from the side 90 degree angle at close range makes the tracer look even longer than from behind. However the farther away you are the shorter the tracer length looks.

(also in general) I am not in the military so I cannot attest to higher calibre weapons like a .50 or 20mm equivalent.
In the end its all just physics though.