John Bischoff
One of the nicest and most appreciated
things you can say about anybody is, “You were right!”. Well, Veral Smith
and Elmer Keith were right, and here’s a part of why they were right.
Bullets with wide meplats and other very blunt-nosed cast bullets really
do perform better on game than would be expected because of their shape
and the way flesh and liquids behave when such bullets strike.
To be fair about it we have to go back
to the end of the Cold War, when the Soviets came up with their “Squall”,
a 200-knot rocket-propelled underwater torpedo with a range of several
miles. At the time, I thought to myself, “How very odd!” and now I've
found out how and why it works.
About the same time the U.S. Navy came
up with a short-range firearm for use by frogmen. It used long and very
pointy bullets and had a range of maybe 25 yards. Soon thereafter, the
Soviets came up with their version, which used equally long bullets with
flat points and had a range of 100 yards (which is about as far as you can
see through water anyway).
Now that business of using a flat point
to get more range than a long pointy point is counterintuitive to say the
least. The trouble is that it really works. The reason it works is called
super-cavitation. The wide flat nose pushes the water so that the water
squishes sideways to get out of the way, and that makes a bubble big
enough to enclose the whole bullet.
As long as the bullet is inside that
bubble, the water cannot get hold of the sides of the bullet to slow it
down or otherwise interfere with its forward progress. When the bullet
finally slows down enough the bubble collapses and slams the brakes on the
bullet’s progress. The Soviet high-speed torpedo, the Squall, has a rocket
motor to maintain the super-cavitating velocity and so has a very long
range.
Exhaustive tests, some real-world, some
done in the laboratory (swimming pools), have amply demonstrated that the
usual military pointy bullets do not penetrate water worth a darn – 3 to 4
feet is about all they can do, including the magnificent .50 BMG. Military
bullets just break up or lose all momentum in about 3 to 4 feet of water
penetration.
Everybody knows that to avoid being
shot, one dives and swim/s underwater toward some safer place. The same
applies, in spades, to the pointy hunting bullets.
But I am reminded of the tale of a gent
who was catching test cast bullets in his swimming pool so he could
better inspect the bullets for gas cutting or something like that.
Unfortunately, he tested one of the old 45-70 bullets with a wide flattish
meplat – and it punched a hole in the bottom of his pool, presumably in
the deep end where the depth would have been about seven to eight feet. I
assume that he was considerably chagrined and stopped following that line
of investigation.
That line of investigation is what we
pursue here and now, with more anecdotal evidence. African hunters have
discovered that very blunt-nosed (wide flat meplat) cast bullets penetrate
all too well, sometimes killing two buffalo with one 45-70 shot. Well,
flesh is pretty much equivalent to water when dealing with the motions and
speeds involved in a bullet impact. Now that I think about it, the usual
high-end hunting bullets expand at the nose to approximate a flat wide
meplat and then penetrate very well.
So, Elmer and Veral were right. Wide
flat meplats really DO give superior performance on game or opponents.
They do so with great reliability because of their shape and not because
they expand. How convenient for bullet casters!
See also: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/06/underwater_guns
and http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/06/shooting_through.html
