Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles Strange Bullet Behaviour?

God damn do love wannabe “Alaskan” talkin bullets, 80lb deer, kelp fed beach bears and such!!!

At least you get to go to sausage fest hi weekly and hear about real killin, whilst hot bedding and snuggling the other slope faags.

waaaaay too fast for cup/core bullets and a so so starting sd, deer size only, ribcage only on anything bigger...go up to the high weight 160+gr eld-m and try that again, you'll end to end the deer, stretch out the depth and grenade cone....a 120 cup/core at 3200 right off the barrel is screaming wolf/coyote formula and deer tops lol....but from 200 to 600 that would be deer nightmare, get to 160+ gr cup/cores though....it's elk/moose/g-bear nightmares muzzle to 500....the formula must be visualized as we don't have the calculators yet to objectify terminal ballistics

you should see what a 120 bt can do when launched from ~2500 fps though...it's impressive

Stinky, you SD obsession is ridiculous. I have been handloading cup and core bullets long before you were hunting. I’m so very well aware of how they perform and very well aware of what a useless nonsensical number SD really is from a practical standpoint.

Here I am almost twenty nine and a half years ago, as a teenager, shooting my own 125gr Nosler Ballistic Tip handloads. For a 308. This particular instance was a complete pass through at between 75 and 100 yards. It’s two miles from the house I grew up in and I drove by this spot two days ago.

I’m very familiar of what core/jacket separation looks like. But I’m also not sure I’ve ever seen a core and jacket separation that resulted in what’s left of the core putting a meaningful hole in the offside of an animal while retaining the jacket. I’m sure it happens, I’ve just never seen it.

I’m the years since, I’ve gone almost exclusively to “fail safe” controlled expansion bullets. Almost. I don’t want to start bullets at 2500 fps and I most certainly don’t want to have to pass shots because of angle. That has never let me down. Ever.

The second picture, ironically, is my son shooting the 308 again, but with handloaded 150gr Hornady Interlock instead. This was the instance that sparked the thread. The amount of game I’ve taken with an incredibly diverse amount of cartridges and bullets in between these two animals is significant.

You can be shooting since smokeless powder was invented, but he ain't wrong about the changing SD defining bullet performance in game.

Who are you to say its ridiculous?

SD is only a legitimate "standard" by which to compare bullets with solids of like construction. Otherwise it's apples and oranges with too many uncontrollable variables to be anything approaching scientific.

It’s ridiculous because it isn’t constant. It’s variables are legion. Pulling bullets out of dead animals will make this pretty obvious.

That seems to support rather than counter his position. Isn't that just what he is saying? That the manner in which the SD changes IN the animal dictates teriminal performance?

correct, it's the only objective number we have to work with, so the astute can look back at all that subjective experience of what worked and then compare possible future outcomes and options for whatever a new goal might be

one day we will be able to use it in a calculator to see why the 35 gr Berger from a .204 is thee perfect coyote load, construction, start/finish sd, travel and impact velocity ranges to make that perfect fur saver drt explosion...

and one day easily see why a 150 gr cup and core kills how it does and what to expect for shot angles vs a 130 gr mono from the same case etc....one starts with more sd but loses way more of it and much faster, the other starts with less but loses it slower and loses way less of it, finishing with more than the 150 cc...

for now we have only the first part of the equation to work with, then we have to use our imagination and faculties to do the rest

for many; just knowing they are starting with more than enough sd will give them all the comfort they need and they don't have to think about it anymore, some of us can't turn the wheels off on it lol

and no 76 its' not ridiculous...what is ridiculous as being a quarter way into the 21st century and still seeing thread after thread go 70 pages deer with everyone's subjective interpretations of terminal ballistics and what happens to our variable sd bullets once the swimming starts.....no argues inflight ballistics anymore, we got that objective thing figured out and the calculators tell the story

we're smart enough to measure rates of change lol....we're smart enough to get this objective also...

how many times have guys downloaded a cartridge for a kid or a wife, cup core, and they absolutely hammer game like it's no big thing, but the dad's think it's too light for them to use personally? lol...people always think more is better re; velocity.....is it though? there's the bullet factor to consider, especially in cup/cores....they stay together better in certain velocity windows....well under a lot of the available cartridges we generally over compensate with due to the subjective mess of terminal ballistics lol

Run the numbers on this. Can you tell me what that calculation means for next time? You can put a number on anything.

I don't question your subjective experience at all Chuck, as I said, you guys shoot straight and kill the big stuff. What I do say though is we could, and should, objectify terminal ballistics at some point this century so you can validate why you choose what you do objectively to go along with your already subjective understanding.

Not everyone gets a chance to learn terminal ballistics by trial and error lol. Some of us are luckier than others that way. No reason we can't take this to the same levels we've taken inflight ballistics.

Coyote,

I'm sure someone could program a model to run different scenarios through, but it ultimately won't tell us anything different than a ballistics gel test. Reason being live animals are impossible to model.

Bullets of the same caliber in the same weight have the same SD until impact.

SD has less than anything to do with how a bullet kills game. Bullet construction, impact velocity, and twist rate are the aspects that matter in how any given bullet behaves in flesh. None of those have any relevance to SD, despite Blakeys fascination with a number that was only relevant when all bullets had the same construction technique.

I tend to agree with that. I do see where coyote is trying to go with this, but I also think that SD is the wrong unit to be measuring what he wants measures. Some one will have to come up with a different formula with more variables involved to predict what he's talking about.

The SD changing is the function of everything you mention though. It is 100% exactly what you are talking about. Bullet weight divided by bullet diameter squared, right?

So if its fragmenting, expanding, etc and that dictates what happens IN game, how is changing SD of a bullet not relevant? With the rate of change being important and a function of velocity.

in that light, how is it inaccurate to say that the difference in terminal ballistics/killing between a Swift A-frame at a certain velocity and a Nosler Ballistic Tip at a certain velocity is 100% because of how the SD of each changes, and that rate of change?

What in the world do you know about “downloading for kids”?

Give kids some credit. Here is what 3275 fps at 300 yards looks like. In the hands of a kid. lol.

so, how it will work, standard testing and medium, you will see a constant that all bullets can be measured before and after to a 'standard' impact velocity and the travel measured and the energy dump across that travel and also the sd dump.....rates can be found....

you have a hard time with this concept because it doesn't yet exist so you think it can't exist....that's where you're falling down here

then we could know what to generally expect on most shots from each choice....is it a 20" penetrator dumping 120 ft/lbs per inch option or is it a 30" dumping 90 ft/lbs per inch?......try to imagine for a second, we know inflight to know what cartridges are 400, 500, 600 yard cartridges etc. or which bullets in a cartridge makes it any of those yardages....

so you wouldn't measure finished sd and travel on animal recovered bullets as you hit bone and angles etc. so you couldn't come up with a consistent way to build the calculator to objective the swimming data....

but that bullet has finished sd's that could be measured lol...it's not much, so you lost most of it over the ~20" of bear you went through and therefore dumped x amount of ft/lbs per inch through that ~20" of bear and I'm guessing flattened that bear on the spot....like I said, lets see what you think about the 130 barnes on similar stuff

I also said you guys shoot straight and that matters most as you are generally always choosing enough sd/bullet construction etc. for the game intended. It's when you want to only burn 30 grains of powder you need a better understanding of these things lol. You've got lots of insurance there in a 308.

I've got pics of a couple whitetails my kids shot from launching 2386 fps 123 gr pills at 300 and 355 yards....you win, or do you? The 300 was about a 150 whitetail, the 355 was just a doe tag.

Pass throughs and died right there too....so many ways one can skin the cat Chuck....not just your way lol

I give kids ALL the credit...just saying I read it all the time about guys downloading for their kids/wives and they still hammer moose etc. and fold them up as good as anyone. No one seems to think why the downloaded set up drops things so well....no one realizing that it may have put the bullet chosen in an even better window to give a drt

It means that the SD of that bullet changed rather rapidly in the animal, and probably had quite a bit of fragmentation and weight loss. It says something about the wound channel it makes.


Bet ya its quite a bit different from what a much tougher bullet does, huh?

Using that particular recovered bullet as an example. How would the SD formula be applied it? Where would one measure the diameter?

If it were up to me?

An average of several measurements, inluding the very large area of the jacket that peeled way back, which emphasises that this was a rather rapid shift lol.

I wonder though, instead of diameter, if you could use change in cross sectional area. Its kind of still a ratio of remaining weight to new diameter, right?