HuntnShoot,
I have several Barnes X's in my collection that lost either all or 3 of their 4 petals, going back to the original X, and including the most recent TTSX's, all from big game either I or my wife killed. The bullets all hit pretty serious bone, and all killed the animal very quickly: The farthest any went after the shot was 38 yards.
Have also recovered some other "petal" type bullets that lost all or most of their petals. Same deal with hitting bone, and how quickly the animal died.
None of those bullets stopped halfway through the animal. All were 1-shot kills.
Fifteen years ago I was sitting around a campfire with Randy Brooks when he mentioned that the earliest X bullets tended to lose their petals. He thought this was a pretty good deal, since the flying fragments resulted in more tissue destruction. But many of his customers were fixated on "100% weight retention," so like any good businessman he pleased his customers, playing with the annealing of the front end until they usually did retain all petals. But he sure didn't think it was necessary.
Now it looks like history is repeating itself. The LRX's are indeed a little "softer" than TTSX's, to insure they expand at longer ranges--and once again some hunters are complaining that some LRX's recovered from really dead animals lost petals, didn't retain enough weight, or don't look right.
