Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters How is Optimum Game Weight Calculation done?

This is a great post.

Gee, I've seen a gemsbok bull gut-shot at 200 yards with a .375 H&H by a companion of mine. The .375 is a more powderful rounds than the .370, by any measure, yet the bull went two miles before it was tracked down and finished.

What I wonder is whether the elk or the gemsbok is truly scientific experiment?

Of course not........it's a "story"......field observations don't count...

Not conducted under lab (controlled) conditions,of course.....

Ahh that's why those two geniuses discount all the experienced hunters and continue to tell them/we/us/you that you're doing it wrong

As my old friend Melvin Forbes says, "Examples of one are never valid."

That seems to be what GS seems to have so far....

What strikes me is the number of hunters who seem to lack a basic understanding mammalian anatomy. The only animals that I have ever seen drop on the spot with a gut shot were actually hit in the spine or the top of the pelvis. I take any ones account of an animal dropping instantly from a gut shot with a grain of salt because it just does not add up, regardless of caliber.

Similarly, I hear stories of animals that were shot "perfectly", but the animal got up and ran off. Often resulting in the hunter discounting the cartridge or bullet used. In my observations the majority of these failures are actually poorly placed shots, often to the very top or very bottom of the spine, resulting in a stunned animal, but not a severed spinal cord.

I think that if rifle hunters approached killing BG animals a bit more like bowhunters do,they might find the whole process pretty simple....bow hunters "know" that hitting the right spot is crucial to success....

But for some reason, rifle hunters make the whole process complex,riddled with theory,and magic,and get bogged down in the process.

Thinking on this issue of being "undergunned",I remind myself..."People kill these things with sticks and strings..." and I'm supposed to worry with a 270?

Yeah...

I've known several bowhunters who are perfectly happy with a .220 Swift or .243 Winchester for the rifle hunting they do.

As a matter of fact, one of the early points in my trend toward smaller cartridges and calibers was the period of intense bowhunting I did in the late 1980's. When you slip a broadhead through both lungs of a bull elk and he goes less than 100 yards before literally tumbling over, you begin to understand that kinetic energy isn't everything!

JB: In a past life, I bowhunted,too....it is astonishing what a sharp broadhead will do....

I begain to question FE with I started handgun hunting in the 70's and found that they could flatten game as good as any rifle without all of the "kinetic energy" of a rifle

Amazing, isn't it?

Shoot 'em where they live with anything that cuts off the blood supply, and they die pretty quickly.

Of course, they don't teach that in college courses in engineering. Luckily I majored in biology!

INDEED...

If you read the entire article you�ll find that both McPherson and Fackler has been debunked by modern science. It looks like Roy Weatherby was right.

If nothing else read Energy transfer required for remote neural effects. Then remember some of our local experts cite Fackler to claim no energy is transferred by the bullet to the target.

Modern science supports MacPherson and Fackler,not the junk science that you post about

Actually, in my experience MacLorry has a real point. The interior damage from Berger bullets does kill big game quicker.

I was one of the gun writers who shot a lot of animals with VLD's in a major test in New Zealand. We also autopsied a bunch of animals from young feral goats to mature red stags, and that is indeed how VLD's work: They go in a couple of inches or so and then pretty much fragment, destroying far more vital tissue than any other expanding bullet I've ever seen.

This also correlated to the average distance the animals went before falling from heart/lung shots. This was the shortest distance I've found in many years of pacing the distance from the initial hit to the dead animal.

However, the half-dozen rifles used in New Zealand ranged from the .257 Roberts with 115-grain VLD's to the .300 Winchester Magnum with 185-grain VLD's. They all killed similarly, despite the difference in bullet weight, diameter, and kinetic energy. At any range out to 350 it was hard to tell the difference: If the bullets hit the right place the animal died quickly. There weren't enough animals shot beyond 350 (and some were shot out to 550) to come to any conclusion.

So the OGW formula still wasn't confirmed.

So you think this study is junk science do you? About the Authors:

Amy Courtney currently serves on the faculty of the United States Military Academy at West Point. She earned a MS in Biomedical Engineering from Harvard University and a PhD in Medical Engineering and Medical Physics from a joint Harvard/MIT program. She has taught Anatomy and Physiology as well as Physics. She has served as a research scientist at the Cleveland Clinic and Western Carolina University, as well as on the Biomedical Engineering faculty of The Ohio State University.

Michael Courtney earned a PhD in experimental Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has served as the Director of the Forensic Science Program at Western Carolina University and also been a Physics Professor, teaching Physics, Statistics, and Forensic Science. Michael and his wife, Amy, founded the Ballistics Testing Group in 2001 to study incapacitation ballistics and the reconstruction of shooting events.

Check out the section titled "II. Physics of the ballistic pressure wave" and you'll see that Fackler was completely wrong about Newton's laws and energy transfer.

We need more pictures!!!



A skwirl shot with a 450gr. hard cast bullet out of a .45-70 case.



A twiddler shot with a 165gr. MRX out of a .30-06 case.



A yummy cow shot with a 53gr. TSX out of a .223PV case.


All three of these have something in common:


bullet placement.....

A fragile bullet into the chest cavity is indeed deadly, but it is not because of "kinetic energy transfer". Secoundary fragments makes a wider wound channel

Oh, and they were all killed with one shot, though it might be hard to infer.....

Hydraulic pressure, not "hydraulic shock" and energy transfer in an inelastic colision is BS. No consevation of energy in an inelastic collision