No. It doesn't. Not unless you happen to be hit in the head such that the bullet penetrates the skull and travels in the liquid surrounding your brain but doesn't touch the brain itself. Or perhaps if a high-power rifle shot goes right through your jugular -- in which case you'd be dead real soon regardless of hydrostatic shock. Even if you get hit right through your liver (one of the few organs which sustain significant damage from hydrostatic shock), you're far far more likely to die from the extreme bleeding that will follow and not of the fact that your liver is busted.

Throwing a figure outta my ass, I'd say about 95% of deaths resulting from gunshot wounds are caused by blood loss or direct damage to vital organs. Direct kills caused by hydrostatic shock are likely to be in the neighborhood of 1% or less.

You cannot be instantly killed unless you sustain massive damage to the brain. A bullet through the brain will do this just as well as an arrow. If you get hit in a major artery, both a bullet and an arrow will kill you just the same: From blood loss. The fact that the bullet might (depending heavily on a number of things) cause more damage in the surrounding tissue is of little signifigance when your femoral artery retracts into your hip.

I just thought I'd throw this out right now: hydrostatic shock is pseudo science bullshit.

Read up.

Anyway, about the iron thing: believe me, I'm aware of how iron ore naturally occurs, and I know some refinement and smelting are required to get to, say, even medieval era wrought iron. My point is only that, really, when you're dealing with magic, which is inherently not bound by the same rational laws of science, you probably can't about cheating it by coating rounds with iron or whatever. To that end, if I were building a world, you'd have to make the round purely out of iron to get the bonus, and I don't think making it frangible would have anything to do with causing damage to something magically active. Like I said, plenty of room for disagreement, but keep in mind that since magic is much more bound to things like intent, emotion, and artistic sense than science ever will be, it's not going to work the same way.

AE I think your numbers are a bit off but I don't have numbers to counter so I won't.

I will say from my own experience that while deer hunting I have seen deer drop dead in their tracks after being hit with an arrow from a 55# draw compound bow. They never took another step and barely twitch after hitting the ground. I have also seen deer run, dead on their feet, a hundreds yards or more after having a 7mm RUM or other similar large center fire rifles that have blown a baseball size hole clean though the boiler room. Killing critters is such an unpredictable thing. Bullets and Arrows do primarily use different mechanisms to kill but to say their mechanism is exclusive of each other is not possible.

It is safe to say arrows are most effective when they employ the largest cutting surfaces while still achieving full or near full penetration of the vital area. The large number and variety of bladed broadheads and the illegality in most if not all states of using field points or blunt tipped arrows for big game hunting would indicate that this is true. I know in Ohio not only do you have to use a broadhead but the cutting edge but above a minimum diameter.

Even with a really powerful bow or crossbow you will never exceed much over 400 fps let alone get anywhere near super sonic where a blunt arrow might start doing more damage than a bladed one. A quick back of the envelope calculation shows that to get near super sonic velocity with a 500 grain arrow (rather heavy) with a troll size bow would require draw from brace height of say 36 inches (about a 44-48 inch arrow) with a draw weight of 800 lbs at the peak. This calculation ignore limb mass and other frictional, viscous looses and then you have the fact that you have to getting materials that could take these types of stresses and still be shaped and function like a bow.

Bullet damage theory is like arguing abortion; you’re just not going to come to a complete solution everyone would agree on, even the experts. I have read more conflicting theories of ballistic wounding then I care to admit, I’m content to say that there are many mechanism at work there and it’s pretty unpredictable as to which of those is going to be the primary cause of death in a give situation.

mcb

That's the thing, though. I would call a sudden, violent pressure wave a "shock wave". It would indeed seem that "hydrostatic" is bullshit, but I don't see how "shock" is. [Edit]Reading it again, I can see it now. I didn't even realize that the word "shock" had such a definition. Oh well.[/Edit]

He's mainly talking about pressure waves inside the thorax and how they may cause (often temporary) damage to the central nervous system. The pressure waves themselves can and will rupture certain organs, crush bone, severely bruise muscles, etc. This significantly increases the amount of tissue damage caused by the projectile in question.

Going to be busy for a while reading through all of this...

What effects, then, would you consider to be causes of death with bullet wounds? I'm the first to admit I'm no expert in this, but even now as I'm reading through yet another article on terminal ballistics I do not see what effects might take a significant chunk out of "vital organs messed up" and "blood in the wrong place" causes of death.

It may well be that you could never get a conventional bow powerful enough to warrant the use of blunt arrows. And now that I think about it, there's no point -- if you want a blunt, 500 grain projectile shot at supersonic velocities, you can get a shotgun. Better stick to what bows and crossbows do best. Which means making bows much more powerful really doesn't improve damage done to humans by them significantly.

The Power increase is sort of warranted by the increased penetration, although I would really like to see some tables about how well different arrows and arrowheads of different weights and velocities penetrate modern body armor.

[Edit]One shouldn't take the linked page as gospel, either. There are some weird contradictions in there, like where he says that bullets generally only go through 2 revolutions, but also says that angular energy often remains after axial energy is depleted so that a bullet might spin-polish hide from the inside. Spin polish hide with perhaps 1 revolution? And I love the way he calls what I called hydrostatic shock the "Splash Effect". [/Edit]

Ultimately you’re probably correct, orgain damage and blood lost will ultimately cause death but from personal hunting experience and from talking to many other hunters there is a lot going on there. I met a guy that was hire to cull the local deer population in the national park near my home. They closed that section of the park down and the hire hunters kill X amount of deer. Most of them use light rifle like 223 Rem or 22 Hornet and it is done at relatively close range. This hunter told me that one deer would take a 223 place properly behind the front leg and simple collapse immediately and never move. The next deer with the same shot at similar ranges would stand there as if missed only to several second later take a few steps and collapse. Other deer with the same shot from the same gun would run at full speed for 100 yds or more before collapsing. Why was one shot instantly fatal and incapacitating and another nearly identical shot just as fatal but allowed the deer to function for several second to almost a minute after that shot before death.

I have shot groundhogs with a 270 Win at close range and hit a little low and emptied every organ below the diaphragm and still have them get back in there hole several yards away. I have also hit them at 140 yard with a 22lr (much less then 100ft-lbs of energy on target) and they never even twitched. Why one shot instantly shuts down the entire central nervous system and another shot leaves the critter in complete control of his faculties while being ultimately just as dead is the point I meant to make. There is just a lot that is not completely understood yet.

mcb

Um actually it does. You should really learn more about firearms before you start correcting people. Read http://www.recguns.com/Sources/VG1.html and http://www.adtdl.army.mil/cgi-bin/atdl.dll...-20/Ch19.htmfor starters. If people died from gunshot wounds the way you say it would be nearly impossible to kill someone in under 2 minutes. Yes a vital hit will kill you nearly instantly (depending on which kind of dead you mean). But most kills are mostly from the shock. Read, learn, then correct.

The article actually claims that: "The point is not to wound or kill the adversary: the point is to stop him in his tracks and make him cease attacking you." That does seem to imply that the author really thinks those bigger bullets stop someone without wounding or threatening to kill them. He also says that a hollow point will "stop" an opponent but not kill him, and he repeats this idea alot, as if killing an opponent wasn't stopping him.

Yet more Weird Shit: "The most effective handgun round on the market - regardless of caliber - is the Federal .357 Magnum 125 grain jacketed hollowpoint (357B). This load has more stopping power than any other handgun bullet (and this includes more powerful rounds like the .41 and .44 Magnums)."
WTF? This guy is seriously suggesting that a .357 Magnum round is better at killing people (well okay, this moron calls it "stopping people, whatever) than anything you can get for a .44 Magnum?

Well. I'm damn glad I didn't bother reading those.

I'm sure you exaggerated a bit here for effect, but still: I'm willing to bet quite a lot on money on there having been cases of a charging cape buffalo or an african elephant stopped with a .303 British or .30-06. It seems to me that a hit at a good angle to the forehead of the animal directly in front of the brain would penetrate their skulls and thus result in immediate death in most situations. Ignoring that, I doubt it's impossible to hit a cape buffalo in such a way as to get a .30-06 shot to reach the spine, which would also cause immediate immobilization.

But this has nothing to do with this one guy's obsession with "street-proven man-stoppers". You don't want to shoot a cape buffalo just to stop it, you shoot it to kill it. This guy wants people to believe they can reliably stop people with reduced chance of killing them, which just doesn't make sense when the primary mechanism of damage from the weapons he's interested in is the permanent wound cavity caused by the projectiles entry into and traveling through the human body.

to see the entire post see page 3

also it is physically possible to make a crossbow that will fire a bolt through a telephone pole.(in this case it was a piece of sharpened rebar with tin can flights)

Yeah, I saw that part. That's not what I meant. If it's still based off a strength rating, that's a crossbow carried by a person. I mean a ballista, mounted on a van and cocked by pnumatics, an engine, etc. Any idea for those? I can go into the why part later, but for now just how it would work.

i think that you could make a ballista by making a large heavy crossbow mounted on a tripod or something, have some method of cocking it the pneumatics or engine which you said in your post. work something out with you GM, and for the love of munchkin make it strong egnogh that it will only take a simple ready action to get the balista ready.
make it a repeating crossbow so it will reload automatically as well as fire faster. make the magizen a bit larger form 5 bolts to 10.
oh i had a look at how much a crossbow bolt weighs, in the book it weighs .05 kilograms, that is realy light so i assume it is for only one bolt. to make a ballista the bolts are going to have to be bigger, maybe .5 kilos.

you didn't seem to like the strength raitngs but i don't see any way to get around it. have a strength minimum rating of over 10 so you have to be insanely strong to use it manually.
i will give you a sample of what i think one should look like

Heavy vehiclular repeating crossbow [str min of 12]
conceal - damage[15]D, SA, (10m), weight 15 Kilograms, 4,840Y,
legality [decide for yourself]
you can find out the ranges for yourself use the heavy crossbow ranges

great now i can make another type of crossbow
heavy vehicular crossbow [str min + 3]D [str min x 200]
heavy vehicular repeating crossbow [str min + 3]D [str min x 320]

I do not exaggerate much on either aspect of the above statement. I believe it is a fairly well document statement that most African game wardens would confirm that more Elephant and Cape Buffalo have been poached with 303 and 30-06 and probably through in 308 Win than all NE combined. On a similar note most American game warden would probably admit that almost as many deer have been poached with 22lr and 22WMR as most other cartridges combined.

As for stopping that charge with a 30 cal I have no doubt that someone has done it with a lucky shot on a cape buffalo, I personally highly doubt in with elephant but flukes do happen.

The problem with a buffalo charge is he put his head down and that huge boss at the base of his horns covers the entire top-back of his head. I have read several account of hunter bouncing 30 cal bullets of the boss with little or no effect on the animal. The only other viable stopping shot staring down the nostrils of an angry Buffalo is the back of the neck and that is also a very tuff target there is a tremendous amount of muscle on top of the heavy vertebra around the spine. While not as bullet resistant as the head in a charging buffalo it proves to be a relative small target making a good shot difficult. 30 cal done have the penetration to get to the heart and lungs on most frontal shot charge of no charge.

I highly doubt a 30 gun has the penetration to attempt any type of frontal shot on and elephant of even moderate size. There is simply to much bone and muscle between the gun and anything lethal. I have also read accounts of poorly place head shots with big NE guns knocking large elephants off their feet. The hunter rather then spending another $10 NE cartridge for a follow up insurance shot on the boiler room starts posing for pictures only to have his trophy revive a few minutes later and get backup and tear off through the underbrush. The elephant skull is very large and thick while the brain cavity is rather small in comparison. It happens more often than it should that a brain shot is mess up and result in a wounded but very functional elephant after he recovers from the initial brain thumping. These elephant frequently go on to live several years until another hunter does the job correctly.

I agree here nothing is reliable when it comes to killing. As for general stopping power I have seen in my hunting experiences and read a lot of unusual things related to killing. I think terminal ballistics is something that will not easily give up is secrets to science. There is just to many fluky things that happen as I have given example in an earlier posts to this thread. I think a lot of the various theories presentled are true at least partially, part of the time. I think you can create situation to support most of the theories. The problem comes down to the fact that none of the theories I have read hold 100% true 100% of the time.

mcb

Hmm, that sounds good to me. I'll run it by him.

I do not doubt that at all. I have no idea about those statistics, so even if I had a doubt I just better keep it to myself. But you said, at first, that those .30s don't stop those animals -- and that was an exaggeration, like you admitted. It happens. You can't count on it, but you can't count on it with .470NE either.

Then we're back to penetration being the key. And the author of that article about defense handguns that cutter07 linked to would have you believe that penetration is bad and counter-productive to stopping things. And, again, that's the bullshit part. You need to have the penetration to hit something vital. I bet it's easier (or more likely, at any rate) to stop a charging cape buffalo with a 7.62x51mm FMJ than it is with 12G buckshot.

This effect, and your follow-up to it, is also mentioned and explained in the same article, right below what I linked already. Like you said, the bullet smacks around the brain of an elephant sufficiently to render in unconscious -- just like a .22LR bullet passing right next to the human brain but not hitting the brain itself might render a human unconscious. However, the target isn't wounded sufficiently to kill it before it regains consciousness. This effect can be and has been explained by scientific analysis, it would seem. The article relates exactly the same kinds of experiences as you've obviously had, and it explains them in a way that I cannot find any holes of logic in -- and neither has anybody else, it seems.

The ability of a bullet to mess with the brain of a living critter isn't "stopping power" or "knock-down power". You obviously do not consider the various .30s powerful enough for a serious cape buffalo hunter -- but you do admit that they can and most likely have been, several times, stopped dead in their tracks with such rounds. Because of lucky (or maybe sometimes extremely skilful) shots.

When considering damage to the central nervous system with a shot through the thorax, comparing cape buffalos and humans isn't a very good idea for a few reasons. Mostly because you really need a rather powerful round to actually get the bullet to penetrate the thorax of a cape buffalo, while any old FMJ round will do that with a human.

If you could reliably get those .30s to penetrate the buffalo, the difference between likelyhood of "stopping" the animal with a .30-06 and a .470NE, all other things being equal, would only come from the distance to the spine at which the pressure waves caused by the passing projectiles are sufficiently powerful enough to damage it. Obviously the .30-06 doesn't cause pressure waves nearly as powerful as the .470NE, thus you have to get it to pass much closer to the spine for that effect.

In a human, the pressure wave effect on the spine seems to be lessened by the simple "design" of the thorax and ribcage, and the projectile generally passes in a different direction -- equivalent of from directly below on a quadraped. Thus to get the immediate drop on a human, you need to get the bullet to pass even closer to the spine.

If the difference between a 9mmP and .357 Mag in that respect is that the latter can do damage to the spine from 1cm further away, all other things being equal, then that's certainly not something to pick your defensive handgun by. Instead, you might pick the .357 Mag because it causes a far larger (greater diameter and deeper) permanent wound channel than the 9mmP.

But then these "stopping power" yokels don't think the effect comes from damage to the central nervous system. They really seem to believe that the bullet somehow magically gains more momentum and energy in flight and actually knocks the target on its ass as a sledgehammer might. They don't even want the bullet to get as far as the spine, or even the vital organs, they want you to get bullets that only barely penetrate the skin of the target. I think you agree that bullets that don't penetrate worth a damn are not good for incapacitating living creatures.

I don't want to sound like the theories on which the works of Fackler and his colleagues in the global scientific field of terminal ballistics research are based on are the One And Only Truth. However, they quite simply make a heck of a lot more sense than anything these "Stopping Power Is The Key" people have come up with.

Additionally, when the rest of the world obviously works according to the laws of physics (whatever those may be), it is probable that terminal ballistics does too -- and the works of people like Fackler do. The Stopping Power myths break several fundamental laws of physics, not to mention how they totally disagree with several basic concepts of medical science.

All through the history of the world, when 2 world views have collided, one based on science and one based on Belief, science has always prevailed. The scientific version is hardly ever the ultimate explanation, but then science improves and the view of the world gets closer and closer to reality.

The people who go on about Stopping Power are like the people who argued that the world is flat or that the world is the center of the universe. The world isn't completely round either, but it's closer to round than flat. The sun isn't the center of the world, but it certainly is the center of our solar system. The theories on terminal ballistics presented by people like Fackler might not be absolute truths, but they are much like Einstein's theory of relativity: There is nothing yet that disproves them, and in every case they agree with reality just as well and usually better than the other theories on terminal ballistics out there.

[I think I had a point when I started out. I think it was that none of the fluky events mentioned by you here are unexplicable by the theories presented by Fackler and others.]

I completely agree with you on all other points except this one. To me it seems that an exit wound is a good thing, because with just one hole to bleed out of, the wound channel might get filled with blood that can't go anywhere and then there might be coagulation going on. It's not much of a difference, but if we're discussing the theoretical optimum, we might as well include the exit wound in there. Then the bullet would just drop on the ground right behind the animal.

This is a very minor point, though, because a bullet that will do what you described at the maximum accurate range will produce the exit wound 99 times out of 100.

I never set out to write that much. I really wish I could get my point into less words, because most of it is just pointless rambling, and I'm afraid it will turn unintelligible. My problem is that I begin writing before I know what my point is going to be.

Frankly, I'm surprised how close to the original we are. The maximum lethality of bolts and arrows was turned into the maximum lethality of bullets and the theories that relate to that.

I didn't get it. You mean, if an attack "peels" the skin and everything below it down to a depth of ½"? From a psychological point of view, quite probably. And I guess it'll hurt a heck of a lot more, although a plain old hole through your torso hurts quite enough, too. And that'd actually mean you lose the skull under on your forehead, so it's going to be plenty lethal as well.

Killing someone by skinning him is likely to take a bit of time, though. I have no idea how fast you bleed when skinned. I mean, you'll bleed a lot, but severing the femoral artery will make you bleed about as much as skinning your whole leg and thigh.

I don't think you can really separate the two like that, if only because bullets would never do such a shallow wound on such a large area. A better example might be comparing a .357 Magnum Glaser and a .357 Magnum JSP.

The "Street-Proven Man-Stopper" people would say the Glaser is better. Those with a scientific mind would say the JSP is better. The Glaser does as much or more tissue damage than the JSP, but will not penetrate into the heart, trachea, spine, or the major arteries in the thorax. The JSP will, and will have a nice exit wound as well. It is possible that a hit to the same location with a Glaser and a JSP would lead to the Glaser killing quicker -- in the abdomen, without any arteries or the spine in the line of penetration.

On a hit to the chest, I would put my money on the JSP. All the good stuff is in the thorax, and quite deep in there, where the Glaser would never get them. A good hit with the JSP would, I assume, kill a human faster than with the Glaser.

It's really neither tissue damage nor penetration that kills effectively. You can damage a whole lot of tissue without causing anything more than pain and some bleeding -- having your whole leg blown into bits will kill you a lot slower than a powerful rifle shot to the chest, on average. Of course you can also penetrate someone fully without causing lethal damage, with a small enough (final) diameter projectile.

This is why the article I linked earlier about Handgun Wounding Factors and Effectiveness clearly points out that the bullet must penetrate more than 12"/30cm, and it must also be of sufficient size to promote rapid bleeding. If the bullet is really sharp, light and small, it isn't particularly lethal regardless of how much it penetrates. If a bullet only penetrates 4"/10cm, it isn't particularly lethal even if it leaves a 2"/5cm diameter cavity.

A baseball-sized hole in the stomach has penetrated you fully. That's way more penetration than a Glaser from any sane caliber could even dream of. None of this penetration-talk has anything to do with boring a "small hole straight through the body" (which I suppose means from the sole of the foot to the top of the head). The most penetration you'll usually need against unarmored opponents is enough to penetrate one arm and the torso sideways. Taking the bones into consideration, that's somewhere around 16-20"/40-50cm.

Any caliber for which some bullet would be capable of blowing a baseball-sized hole through a human's stomach there are bullets for which would blow a hole 1"-2" in diameter through your arm and the whole torso sideways, which is about 100% likely to kill you, and fast. Possibly faster than a baseball-sized hole in the stomach, because the good stuff is in the thorax.