There is a book called Rifle Accuracy Facts written by a guy who was the supervisor of the aeroballistics division of Sandia National Laboratories who doesn't agree.
Here is more on my book report on Rifle Accuracy Facts. First who is the author? What is his background?
Harold Roy Vaughn was born in 1924 at the family farm a few miles south of Amarillo, Texas. After graduating from high school, he entered Amarillo Junior College in September, 1941, to study engineering. He volunteered for the Army Air Corps Reserve (the beginning of the US Air Force) in June, 1942, and reported for duty in February, 1943. He flew 100 combat missions in P-47's and P-51's from bases in New Guinea, Morotai, the Philippines, China, and Okinawa and was awarded the Air Medal with four Oak Leaf clusters and seven battle stars during his tour of duty.
Harold returned to civil- ian life in January, 1946, and to Amarillo Junior College to finish the last semester of his sophomore year in engineering. During the summer of 1946, he entered the University of Colorado and received a BS in aerodynamics in 1948 and a MS in aerodynamics in 1949. He worked at the NACA (now NASA) Ames Research Laboratory, Moffett Field, California, from September 1949 to September 1951, where he conducted research on the aerodynamics of swept wings. In September 1951 he joined Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico as a staff member in the Aerodynamics Department. He was promoted to Supervisor, Aeroballistics Division in July 1959, a position he held until his retirement from Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) in 1986.
In the early 1950's he recognized the ballistics problem of roll-pitch resonance of tactical bombs. He mathematically modeled this motion and then recommended a fix of fin tabs, canted fins, or spin rockets to spin through the bomb pitch frequency, thereby avoiding divergent pitch/yaw motion. These solutions have been used on all nuclear bombs and sounding rocket systems at SNL. He was responsible for the aerodynamic design of a rocket boosted Mach 5 test vehicle to test baro-fuzing probes in 1957. He pioneered the use of computers in the field to calculate launcher settings to minimize dispersion for the several hundred unguided instrumentation rockets launched at Kauai and Johnston Island during the 1958 and 1962 high altitude nuclear tests. He was responsible for the aerodynamic design of the 14,000 pound Strypi rocket system which was developed in the fall of 1962 to boost a 560 kilogram nuclear warhead to an altitude of 150 kilometers at Johnston Island for the Checkmate event of the Dominic high altitude test series.
Harold has many hobbies — big game hunting, oil painting, photography, electronics, skiing, fly fishing, gardening, ultralight aircraft, and precision shooting. His advancing years have made some of these hobbies fond memories but he still pursues the less physically demanding ones.
Behind his desk in his spacious study hangs a majestic elk, originally number 13 in the book. A grand slam on sheep adorns the fireplace wall. Numerous other big game trophies decorate the study.
This man really is a rocket scientist, a warrior, and an outdoorsman. I admire him. His book Rifle Accuracy Facts was published in 1998 and is a very good read.
He says at the beginning of Chapter 4 on barrel vibrations that it is one of the largest contributors to rifle inaccuracy, and laments that he can find no past studies on this subject, mainly because it would take a big budget, and someone like DOD or a major gun manufacturer to do it.
I believe one thing we have going for us is that there has been a lot of science and exploration into the science of barrel harmonics since 1998 both in scientific terms and in empirical methods such as OCW charge weight testing and Audette Ladder Testing, and the Satterlee method.
Some interesting things I picked out from his Chapter 4. His studies of vibration in the rifle system did not include a lot of detail on the pressure profiles vs. time inside the barrel, or frequency oscillation measurements along the barrel vs. time. His main focus revolved around frequency oscillation at the receiver ring, and the moments of force at the receiver ring, and the resulting deflection of the barrel muzzle due to recoil and moments caused by recoil, and by oscillation at the receiver. Apparently, he did do some rough computer models on vibrations in the barrel which are documented in an appendix, but it doesn't seem to me an outside observer (not a scientist or an expert) that he focused on this to the same extent as say Varmint Al (from Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Labs) using Finite Element Analysis models to model and display barrel harmonics at work.
I believe these were the constraints he was under due to budget. This study was likely sponsored by the DOD through the Aberdeen Proving Ground Labs.
So, some of the aspects of barrel harmonics including pressure profiles and velocities in the barrel, and harmonic frequency vs. time all along the barrel were not data collected nor focused on in this book
Here are some things though that I found very interesting.
Another thing that often occurs in bench rest shooting is vertical stringing of groups. The traditional medicine for this problem is to keep increasing the load (and pressure) until it stops, and sometimes it works. (Think increasing charge weight vs. time graphs, Audette Ladder Test and OCW method with increasing charge weights)
Page 53
It should be pointed out that vertical stringing in bench rest guns can also be caused by high frequency barrel vibration which is discussed at the end of the chapter. Now we return to the original investigation.
Page 54
Here is what he further says about vertical stringing
(Think the Audette Ladder Test)
We found a similar variation in the vertical position of groups with a heavy varmint 6PPC bench rest gun belonging to a friend (Dr. Jackson). Figure 4-41 shows a plot of the vertical variation of point of impact with gravity variation removed for this gun. Notice that the frequency is lower as one might expect about 6.7 kc instead of 9.5 kc. But it appears to be the same
phenomenon.
The vertical stringing of the group size (not shown) is at a
minimum below 3100 fps and above 3300 fps. This correlates with the negative slope of the sine wave (Think Velocity nodes and sills, a lower node below 3100 and an upper node above 3300 fps.) ,
We have found that Vertical stringing of groups is common in bench rest guns and the typical approach is to keep increasing the load until it stops.
(Think increasing charge weights to find a sweet spot) Unfortunately, this won't always work because you run into the maximum pressure restriction or the vertical dispersion may be caused by another problem.
Vertical stringing of groups can be caused by bolt lugs not seating evenly on
the receiver lugs.
Page 87
We also demonstrated that barrel vibration causes a vertical shifting of the center of impact of groups with changing muzzle velocity.
(Yes POI shift and muzzle velocity are related because of barrel timing of the bullet and muzzle position at exit)
Page 89
So, my conclusion is that Harold Vaughn did not focus on the relationship of muzzle velocity to barrel harmonics as much as I am in my thinking, but he sure mentions it in a lot of interesting ways throughout his book. It was written in 1998.
This white paper below was written in 1997. This guy was definitely thinking along the lines I am.
https://2poqx8tjzgi65olp24je4x4n-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/incremental-load-development-method.pdf 
