To all-
The problem with water jugs is they VASTLY overstate expansion of bullets. So hard bullets come out looking much better than they really do in tissue, and soft bullets look worse.
That’s all you can get out of jugs- looks. What wounds they will create and how well they kill can not be correlated from jugs. Performance in ballistic gelatin can be correlated to tissue, however.
While I agree whole-heartedly that gelatin can provide information that is unobtainable with water jugs, such as size of the temporary and permanent wound cavity, I think you will agree that a bullet that does not expand in water isn’t likely to do so in tissue, either. That’s a correlation.
Conversely, a bullet that blows up in flesh can be expected to do so in water as well. Another correlation.
There are plenty of good bullets that expand well with good weight retention and penetration in both water and tissue – yet another correlation – and it isn’t that hard to find them. I’ve recovered North Fork bullets from elk, deer, dirt and water and you would be hard pressed to tell me which came from where. Barnes X bullets disappointed on game and varmints so I water jug tested the MRX and TTSX before using them. They have not disappointed, with about 50% straight-down results on game and soup in the chest cavity. Same with the no longer available Hornady 220g FN for the .375 Win – no animal went more than a leap and the result on water jugs was to blow up the first jug and blow a hole in the plywood supporting it. Speer Grand Slams are (or at least were when I was using them) a fairly hard bullet that was lethal to animals from prairie dogs to elk and was devastating to water jugs.
I could go on, but the point is that while water jug testing is not fully deterministic (and neither is gelatin testing, btw), to say that there is no possible correlation between water jug testing and on-game performance is incorrect.
