Thanks for posting the link. I've read that article before, but had lost the link to it. I'm gonna print it out for my files when I get home tonight.
I think one of the concepts that trips people up in this discussion is that the study of
terminal ballistics is NOT the same thing as the study of
terminal effects. Terminal ballistics is essentially the study of the physics of missile impact on a terminal medium, whereas terminal effects is the study of the physiological effects of the missile's impact on a living organism. I have done a lot of work with terminal ballistics experts over the years, but I am not a ballistician. (My interest and expertise (such as it is) has been much more in the area of terminal effects. My background is medicine, physiology, and biochemistry, not physics or engineering.) Ballisticians need physiologists, and vice versa, when we start looking at questions of lethality of bullets.
Unfortunately, too many people take the simplistic view that if they can only quantify terminal ballistics to a sufficiently fine degree they will have the miraculous answer to all their hunting/killing questions. This is nonsense. There is no such thing as a "perfect bullet", although some bullets perform sufficiently well over a specific range of physical parameters and desired terminal effects that they might serve for all of one's hunting/killing needs.
I find it interesting to read of the experiences of older fellows who have a lot of experience hunting and shooting animals... Karamojo Bell, John Taylor, Elmer Keith, Bob Hagel, and Craig Boddington come immediately to mind. In each case they settled on a basic bullet/caliber "theory" and stuck with it over many, many kills. Despite a lot of experimentation on each man's part, they each settled on one or two solutions and then just shot the heck out of everything they hunted. Our own Mule Deer wrote a column a short while back describing his own full-circle experience with Nosler Partitions, as a point of interest.
Just my dos centavos anyway.
