Bullets are more destructive the farther away???

[Bushman]

I watched that two hour sniper show on the History Channel again last night and that is what one of the Iraq snipers said during an interview. I assume that those guys are shooting match bullets which do have a small hollow point if they are the Sierra brand. Anyway, the guy stated that on the close shots that the bullets zipped right through and did not disrupt much in the target. On farther away targets after the bullet had slowed down more, it remained in the target longer and did more damage.

This isn't the first time that I've heard that something fast, just zips right through. I've heard that from the archery guys too. What is the real story here? Maybe match bullets perform differently from soft point bullets? Then too I have read that lots of guys experience more DRT kills at longer range than they do at shorter range with the same bullets. What gives?

[GF.]

Just show to go ya... Ignorance is treatable, but only among those who'll take the cure.

Penetration can increase at longer range because the bullet deforms less and therefore, with a smaller front end and more mass behind it, it takes longer to come to a stop.

Bullets that 'zip through without opening up' are only more and more likely to do so at increased range, though if you're using something like a Partition, you can have the whole front end blown off at impact, allowing only the base to exit, and that can look like the bullet never opened up, but in truth 'tis only the base of it that failed to expand.

Look at it this way - put a bullet on the anvil, nose up, and smack it with a hammer. The harder you smack it, the more damage it sustains, right? Farther away = slower bullet = less force of impact = less destruction. Equal and opposite reaction says less damage to bullet means less damage to target. Therefore, the only way a long-range bullet could be more 'destructive' is if a HP were to frag on impact and fail to penetrate adequately at short range (Ballistic Tips, anyone?) but hold together well enough to penetrate & kill farther out.

But that's a failure to use the right bullet for the job, not some predictable result based on the laws of physics.

Match grade bullets are often HPs, but built with thicker jackets than hunting HPs, so I don't think that I'd expect one to bounce off of man or beast at powderburn ranges....

Herne can give you every last detail, but long & short is that the guy was dead wrong!

[Bushman]

GF, you are singing to the choir on that one. It was one of those what did he just say moments. I figure that I am about 11" front to back through the torso which must be pretty typical for the average bad guy with an RPG. One does wonder just how much longer a 175 grain match bullet would remain languishing in there doing damage at 500 yards than at half of that distance? You math guys could probably work that out, but I'll venture a guess that it would be measured in milliseconds.

OK, I don't stutter and I only typed moments once. I saw this same double word thing in the first to second line yesterday too, but I let it go. I can't take one of those moments out without removing both of them because that second one doesn't even show up in the edit copy. Is it just my Bushman paranoia that Swamp is out to get me, or does it happen to others too?

[dave-t.]

I don't know why it is, but I've had more deer drop at the shot out past 175yrds, than closer in shots. It makes zero sense to me, and I always thought it was a fluke, but there has to be something to it.

My farmer buddy has seenn the same thing but describes it differently. His words "Those fast bulllets .243's and 7mm mags don't really get up to speed until thhey're 200+yds out, that's when they really hit hard."

That sounds backwards and stupid as can be, but when all you see is the reaction of the critter getting shot, I would think the same thing by looking at those results.

[swamp]

A bullet begins to decelerate the instant it leaves the bbl...

[Twanger]

My experience with the Hornady 240gr XTP at 1850fps is that they are very explosive up-close when I shoot a deer at say 10 yards, but at 80-100 yards they do not make the 'surface splash' wound effect that I see up close. Not too surprising... they are a handgun bullet really designed for use below 1400 fps.

All bullets are designed to operate throughout a range of muzzle velocities, and if you go above or below that range bad things can happen.

[purple heart]

It was always my understanding that under the Geneva convention militarys have to use ball ammo
and not hollow point or soft point ammo. Under those conditions it could be possible that a round
at close range and maximum velocity could zip through a target and not do as much terminal damage as
a round at a greater distance that has slowed down and therefore takes more time to pass through the target.
There is a lot of vareying factors involved. JMHO

[dave-t.]

I could see that having some effect on fmj bullets. As the speed slows down the spin rate slows, allowing pitch and yaw to develop into tumble in the target.

The bullet is still spinning the same rate over distance, (1 turn every 10" or whatever the rifling twist is), but as the velocity slows down throughout the trajectory it could affect the forces of the spin and stability. The 1-10 spin rate at 3200fps, is a faster spin than the same 1-10 twist at 1800fps, if measured in time of flight. The centrifugal force is less on the slower bullet, allowing the bullet to pitch and tumble with the slower projectile. You would get more revolutions with the faster bullet over the same flight time compared to a slower velocity projectile, eventhough over the same distance you should have the same number of revolutions. The faster bullet should have a harder centrifugal force affect keeping true to it's trajectory in the target.

Doesn't help much in the theory of hunting bullets though.

[GF.]

His words "Those fast bulllets .243's and 7mm mags don't really get up to speed until thhey're 200+yds out, that's when they really hit hard."

That sounds backwards and stupid as can be, but when all you see is the reaction of the critter getting shot, I would think the same thing by looking at those results.

Not just sounds backwards …. IS

I had to go back and re-read the original post, and here’s what I had jumped on in the first go-round:


… on the close shots… the bullets zipped right through and did not disrupt much in the target.

What’s unclear is whether he’s saying that the bullets themselves did not disrupt much, or if his point was that not so much of the target got disrupted.

If the former, I’ll stand by my earlier assertion that ignorance can be an incurable condition in those staunchly committed to it; if the latter, I think he’s probably correct.

Herne has pointed out at least once here that energy transfer is a function of time inside the target; after all, energy transfer is ‘complete’ when the bullet remains inside the target indefinitely, so it’s just a matter of degree. How much energy goes from A to B depends on how hard you push and how long you keep pushing, which is why high-performance bows have low brace heights and magnum rifles tend to have longer barrels.

So the interesting inference is that (within practical limits) lower-velocity rounds should kill more effectively than faster ones. HUH??? But our collective experience with roundballs, full-bore conicals and straight-walled cartridges seems to bear that out; these rounds simply kill a lot more efficiently than the ‘energy’ figures suggest that they should.

And it’s entirely possible that there is a velocity at which tissue destruction is maximized, due to a convergence of the manner in which gases and liquids are displaced within the limited elasticity of living tissues… Though I’m not sure how you’d determine exactly what it is.

And let’s not forget that it’s not just how much energy gets transferred, it’s where that occurs that matters. That’s why we all hunt with (more or less) controlled-expansion bullets, rather than varmint-class hollowpoints, and it does stand to reason that higher-than-intended impact velocities can cause a relatively frangible deer bullet to act more like a varmint load, and waste a lot of that ‘energy transfer’ on tougher, non-vital tissues while the remains of the bullet sort of squib through the vitals. And that gets back to any number of discussions of bell-shaped vs. football-shaped wound channels…

As to the hardball sniper rounds, I don’ know much about that, but the ‘in-line penetration’ vs.’ bullet spinning off its axis’ hypothesis makes intuitive sense to me…

[dave-t.]

Yes it is backwards, we all know that, but something is happening at 200yds when the bullet strikes a deer that is lacking at 40yrds, with these faster projectiles.

I wouldn't be surprised though if someone discovered that the optimal bullet speed for an optimal reaction on deer sized game would be 2400-1800fps (wild arse guess) or some such. But some of that would depend on the make up of the projectile and how hard/soft it is, and where it hits.

It seems we are at the point with hunting where we know what works very well, (shot placement, shot angles, bullet make up, velocity, etc), but every so often something works better than expected, and it leaves us scratching our heads as to why that one was so much better than what has worked very well in the past.

[Bushman]

I think that you guys might be onto something here. Dave I really like your theory on spin stabilization. I'm told that the really slow rifling twist of the first AR 15's in Viet Nam caused some horrific wound channels. Even though the bullets were hard ball, they tumbled when they hit soft tissue. I just finished a sniper book and the only bullet references were always Sierra match bullets. I just pulled out my chart on .30 caliber bullets from that old Handloader Magazine issue and the Sierra Matchking bullet was by far the worst bullet on the entire page. Terrible fragmentation into wet news print. I wonder if snipers were/are somehow exempt from the Geneva Convention bullet mandates?

[dave-t.]

It is still a full metal jacket, but the jacket is very light.

Also, I can't take credit for the theory of spin vrs speed, I'm not that sophisticated. I have just read on handloading forums that the way to stabalize projectiles that should be to long for a rifling rate of twist, is to push them faster, so that they are getting more revolutions in time although no more revolutions in distance. They are spinning faster even at the same rate of spin....anyway, it adds another dimension into what forces work on a bullet.

[GF.]

Actually, Dave, I once spoke with a Sierra tech who said that the reason they don't recommend these bullets for hunting is that the jacket is on the thick & heavy side..... The story was nothing to do with Geneva conventions, but rather just the fact that it's easier to get a consistent thickness from a heavier jacket than a lighter one; the HP design is there to provide a rearward-biased weight distribution, rather than varmint-round type expansion, and the tech gave me the message that they were an illegal hunting round because they were not an expanding-type of load.

All of which does nothing at all to explain what Bushman just said about bad fragmentation on newsprint, but then again, since these bullets have no particular features designed to hold them together on impact, a short-range shot into wet paper might well jack 'em up but good, even compared to a pretty basic hunting bullet.

I do recall that Allen Day used them with good results at long range out of his .300 Mag, though....

Stabilizing a bullet by driving it faster makes good sense, though. Stabilization's all about RPMs, ultimately, so the barrel's 'rate of twist' is kind of a misleading statistic, no? You think about it, and if a .22-250 shooter says that a 1 in X rate of twist is ideal for stabilizing a 68 grain bullet, I'd bet that a guy whose world revolves around a .22 Hornet to tell the guy that a bullet of that weight requires something closer to 1:X/2.

Kinda makes me wonder about those 'slow-twist' AR-15s/M-16s, though... I think Herne did a thorough job of discussing how much more quickly a bullet breaks up at high RPMs once it ticks off of something... So I wonder if the 'horrific' wound channels were from slow-spinning bullets that held together more as opposed to breaking up but penetrating in a more linear fashion....:hmmmm:

Either way, I guess it pays not to get in front of one of the little buggers....

[dave-t.]

The only thing I've heard about using sierra matchkings for hunting is that they practically detonate, shed jackets, core seperation etc.

I've never shot one, so I don't know how they react in the target.

[bill m]

I load Hornady A MAX bullets for most of my rifles because I mostly target shoot. The A MAX bullet is very thin-skinned; like some of my friends. I have shot Sierra Matchking but don't know much about them. Their website doesn't talk about that.

My 243 has a 1 in 10 twist. I tried to shoot the 105 grain A MAX and it wouldn't stabilize. The book said that it might not. I worked that bullet from a starter load through to Maximum load. It wouldn't stabilize. I had problems with the 100 grain also.

My targeting goes out to 700 yards. If my bullet doesn't stabilize, I know it at the 100 yard targets and am sure at 200 yards. I'm not sure that I believe that a bullet becomes unstable during it's flight. I have a feeling that the bullet wasn't really stable in the first 100 yards unless it is defective or not a premium bullet. The Hornady and the Sierra fly nice. But if the bullet is too long, the rifling has to be faster. My shooting partner's 6mm has a 1 in 8 twist and his 105 fly nice.

It was mentioned earlier that bullets have a speed range where they function the best. My Hornady manual shows its typical hunting bullets of 180 grain to give optimal terminal performance between 2400 and 3400 FPS. That seems like a pretty wide range that would fill most realitys.

I can imagine that the bullet would leave different evidence though if you could compare a hit at 3400 and the same hit at 2400. Maybe not.

[Herne]

There are a couple of factors. Double the velocity square the drag

So a fast or close in bullet is going to expand rapidly and transfer a lot more energy, but mostly near the surface. You can't get away from the fact that there is more energy available (velocity). Having transferred that energy and expanded lots there is probably less mass and lower velocity - so residually it may not do much. It explains exactly the big hole in the shoulder and not so impressive inside.

The opposite is true at lower velocities or longer range. ie hte bullet doesn't expand so much, so it has been braked less, so it has more mass (retained weight) and hence more retained energy available to be transferred into the core of the target.

And then, as Matt so rightly pointed out, energy transfer = work done and work is a RATE. Joules per second or parts thereof. And work is power. So if its in the body longer it can potentially transfer more energy.

Hence the heavy for calibre bullet at moderate speed as being the best killer.

Has to be. Because the laws of physics says it must, despite the claims of the advertisers.

That is exactly why i always used the 270/150 and why it will in certain circumstances outperform the 300WM in the target. there was a method in the madness

[Chuck S]

http://www.thegunzone.com/opentip-ammo.html apparently the SMK is a legal round. From tests and experience these bullets do not expand per se but rather either zip through or fragment due to tumbling. if the shot lucks out and enters a perfectly homogeous area it's likely to zip through as would any FMJ round. Add a bit of bone, matted fur, etc and the bullet being pointed will likely yaw, then tumble and fragment. As far as distance goes and the original statment made by the sniper, he was likely drawing an erroneous conclusion based on insufficent data. Penetration is based on momentum, bullet construction and medium being shot. It's often counterproductive to push a bullet beyond it's design as then it deforms too rapidly and penetration suffers. A great read on this is Ballistics in Perspective by LaGrange. Another can be found here on the web at: http://www.rathcoombe.net/sci-tech/ballistics/methods.html#medium_bore

[Hi Ball]

Well I suppose my old physics instructor could teach us all a thing or two about numbers and such but I only know what I have learned via the performance and use of my own rifle and those bullets I have tried out in my tests prior to hunts taken. I used a Belgium Browning in the .300 Win mag caliber for over 20 years, shooting into all types of test media at distances from 100 yards to 500 yards. I do know that my .300 win mag with a 150 grn bullet at under 50 yards, did the most destrcution I have ever seen to the front end of a whitetail deer. My .270 Winchester using 130 or 150 grn bullets never did that kind of distruction to any deer.

I can tell you that in my hunting days, I have shot a lot of critters with the Nosler Partition, Remington Core-Lokts, Hornady bullets, Bitter root bullets and Sierra bullets too. The Noslers stayed together, at least the back half did and the closer the game was to the muzzle of my rifle, the faster that front half of the bullet got pushed away by the animals tissue. The less bullet retention I had on the recovered bullet from game up closer than those out at 300 or 400 yards............I never shot anything at 500yds in those early years.

The distances some of these miliatary snipers are shooting is far above my comprehension..........mile & 2 mile kills!!! Holy Cow this is unbelievable but I know it is done every day by our troops in battle. I know for a fact that a bullet weighing 700 grains and carrying 12,000 pounds or muzzle energy is a force to reckon with period.

[Drakeslayer]

Some guys from work with military experiance suggested that the extreme long range sniper hits have the bullet traveling on a mostly downward trajectory by the time they reach the target (remember they trave lin an arc), theyby causing a lot of damage since they intersect with a larger cross section of the body. Upper chest or head to ass is what they suggested. I don't have personal knowledge of this but this could have an effect on destructiveness if correct.
Drake

[AK-49]

drop a bullet into your hand from 2 vertical feet away... how much damage did it cause? now should the bullet drop from 100 vertical feet into your hand... how did that feel in comparison?