country_20boy,
The Berger Hunting VLD's and Hornady SST's do not perform exactly the same way.
MOST expanding bullets, including SST's, start to expand as soon as they hit hide, normally fully expanding before they penetrate their own length. This is why the meat around the entrance hole tends to be very damaged, especially with plastic-tipped, lead-cored bullets that expand violently. The area behind the entrance hole is also damaged, the reason you see so much interior damage from SST's.
Berger's, and a few other bullets with very long, tapered points that have tiny or even closed hollow-points, normally penetrate a couple of inches before expanding--but when they do expand, they expand even more violently than SST's. In fact it's rare to recover a Berger that looks the like conventional "mushroom" many hunters expect, except sometimes at longer ranges. Instead they typically fragment.
The entrance hole is normally very small, often so tiny that I've often had to part the hair to find it, but the exit hole (if the bullet exits) is typically much larger than from expanding bullets like SST's. They also tend to drop animals very quickly, due to the massive damage inside the chest.
Also, Berger's have considerably higher ballistic coefficients than SST's. This doesn't matter much at the ranges most hunters shoot, but does at longer ranges, where they drift noticeably less in the wind.
Thanks for the detailed response. I would still assume that for 99% of hunting situations, the results would be the same with either bullet, all else being equal. Both would result in a very dead critter with a very messy chest cavity and some amount of bloodshot meat.
Obviously shot placement trumps all.
