Do guns made to fire darts leave rifling grooves like normal guns? I'm guessing they do, since straight flight is straight flight, but wanted to double check and figured there were plenty of gun experts here.

Thanks!

i don't believe so. darts are fin-stabilized, so they don't need barrel rifling.

Not only don't they need it, it slightly reduces their accuracy. The effect isn't too big, I suppose, since the Brits don't seem to use any method of not imparting spin on their 120mm APFSDS rounds. Still, there'd be no point putting rifles on a weapon only meant to fire fin-stabilized projectiles.

If the weapon is meant to be firing spin-stabilized projectiles a large part of the time, the rifling marks would, of course, be found on the pieces of the sabot instead of the projectile itself.

Also note that the sabot will typically be made of a much lighter material than the projective and also be in 3 or 4 seperate pieces. The light weight and non-aerodynamic shape means that the bits of the sabot will not go very far. This means that you will have to find the small bits somewhere between the point of the shot and the impact point. Much harder than finding the projectile itself.

I don't know much about dart-guns, but with arrows, it's the "fins" (fletching) that provides the spin for stability. So maybe some darts do. But the ones I've seen (on TV, admittedly) have kind of a poofball thing on the end, not fins, so I don't see how that would impart a spin.

Thanks!

@Austere: I immediately thought off the tranquiliser dart gun. What the hell is that thing you posted? Armor piercing whatever amunition for what kind of gun?

M829 APFSDS for the 120mm M256/Rheinmetall L44 tank gun, the sabot disengaging the projectile right after it comes out of the muzzle. Projectiles of similar shape have been designed to be fired out of small arms, such as the 5.6mm flechette for the FN ACR and the 15.2mm APFSDS round for the Steyr IWS 2000 (I believe both prototypes were smoothbores), though no such weapon has ever entered production AFAIK.

I think the animal-sleepy dart guns use presurized air to propel the dart. The resivoir section of the dart is typically pretty large. This means that the darts are drag stabilized in flight.