Bullet drop uphill and downhill I have been trying to figure out why a bullet seems to drop less quickly over the same distance when shot uphill or downhill (i.e. not parellel to the earth's surface), and can't wrap my head around this for some reason.  This first thing I thought of is shooting a bullet straight up or down and how this would have no bullet drop, but for some reason this didn't help my understanding.  I've read some articles saying that if you are shooting at an object 500m away at an incline, that gravity only affects the horizontal distance (i.e. something less than 500m depending on the angle).  Yet this doesn't make sense to me either considering a bullet shot at a target 500m away either at an incline or horizontally should take the same amount of time to get to the target and thus gravity would be affecting them for the same amount of time. An explanation with words and not a complex equation would be greatly appreciated. 
 A: It is not obvious what you mean by 'drop'. Possibly it means the angle between the direction you need to aim to hit the target and the line of sight to the target. 
Using this interpretation, shooting vertically up or down results in no 'drop', for obvious reasons. It is reasonable to expect that the maximum angle of 'drop' occurs when the target is horizontal with the shooter. Or, more exactly, the bisector of the 'drop' angle is (approximately) horizontal. The reason is that when gravity is perpendicular to the trajectory it has the maximum effect of deflecting the bullet. The component parallel to the trajectory merely increases or decreases the speed towards the target, which increases or decreases the time of flight. (Your assumption that the time of flight is the same shooting uphill, downhill or horizontally, is not correct.)
However, this intuition does not prove that this scenario results in the maximum angle of 'drop'. It is possible that there is more than one maximum angle of 'drop'. A detailed calculation is required to be sure what the answer is.  
The answers and comments to Unintuitive: Aim the barrel downward to compensate for the uphill? might be useful.
