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02-05-2008, 02:46 PM

#65

Killer_Primate

Nontypical Buck

Join Date: Sep 2006

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Posts: 1,394

RE: For All you 223 Fans

Quote:

ORIGINAL: ipscshooter

I thought that part of the killing power of a bullet was related to hydrostatic shock and the disruption of organs not directly impacted by the bullet. Seems to me that if your .30-06 bullet expands to, say, .500 and completely penetrates the body due to its higher speed and energy, whereas the 7.62X39 bullet expands to, say .450 (because of its slower speed) and penetrates all of the body, but ends up lodged under the skin on the opposite side, the .30-06 is still going to do a lot more damage, because it's travelling at a higher rate of speed, and generating greater hydrostatic shock/organ disruption as it passes through, whereas the 7.62 X 39 is slowing down so quickly that for the last half of its trek through the body it's generating very little hydrostatic shock/organ disruption.

In doing a little "google-ing", I found this:

Quote:

How Deep Can It Get Before It's Too Deep? It does not matter to effectiveness if the bullet exits. So long as it contacts something vital, it matters not a whit whether a bullet stays inside the body cavity or not. A bullet which doesn't exit and "dumps its energy" into the body, cannot kill any more effectively than one which traverses the victim and exits. The most effective bullet will be the one that expands and penetrates all the way through, taking large pieces of things like the spinal colum with it on the way out. So there is really no such thing as "overpentration" but "underpenetration" is a real problem, especially if your target can shoot back.

I agree with that somewhat. In a perfect situation the bullet would travel all the way through a given target and then fall straight to the ground on the other side. This would mean that all of the energy was delivered to the animal.

However, as stated in my other post, “Yeah, it’s all about how it (the energy) is delivered. Caliber, distance, bullet weight, sectional density, projectile materials and shot placement”.
All those things matter. An armor piercing bullet for instance – the people who don’t understand what that means will probably think “wow, those must be powerful”, but really they aren’t anymore powerful than any other projectile of the same weight traveling at the same speed; they’re just “harder”, so they keep going without expanding, which would make them terrible for hunting, unless you were hunting warhorses of steel I guess.

What I’m getting at is – who is to say that a .223 isn’t powerful enough to put down a deer, regularly even, and from many different shot angles. Kinetic energy is limited by its own potential. And if a bow can kill a deer with any type of consistency, so can a .223 projectile shot from a rifle.

.223 boattail HP match weighing 69 grains leaves the barrel at 3000 fps and has 1379 ft-lb of energy. Out to 200 yards the projectile is traveling 2458 fps and has 926 ft-lb. How is this not acceptable when just about any bow you can find and shoot in the lower 48 is going to be considerably less than 100 ft-lb of energy?

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