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Effective Game Killing

cajun said:
Other than shot placement the most important thing to me is bullet construction and how much tissue damage it does while giving an exit the majority of the time. Case in point. 15 years ago I had my first custom rifle built. 7 mag on sako action. During load dev I was trying different bullets and powders I had on hand. I had some 140 gr barnes TTSX on hand that I had loaded for a friend. The rifle shot everything great but it just loved those barnes. So I tried them. Every deer shot with them through the rib cage ran at least a 100 maybe 150 yds. Which where I was hunting made recovery a bitch. Opening the deer up there was an x pattern through the lungs but very minimal tissue damage. Swapped over to 140 BT. Same velocity at muzzle and roughly at impacts. 100-200 yds. The deer shot with the BT all had an exit but the lungs were soup. The farthest a deer has run was 40 feet. I believe that 100% weight retention bullets do not transfer much energy to the animal unless major bone is impacted. The few BT I have recovered over the years typically had 65-75 weight retention.
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Yep. A solid has excellent weight retention but not impressive one-shot kills. Bullets lose mass because of energy transfer that exceeds the integral strength of the bullet... and the quarry's tissues are also correspondingly damaged by that energy transfer. Monolithic bullets can be designed to be less resistant to deformation at the tip and more so towards the base. We could call it the Partition Principle, and encourage bullet manufacturers to come up with different solution to the same problem.
 
cajun said:
Other than shot placement the most important thing to me is bullet construction and how much tissue damage it does while giving an exit the majority of the time. Case in point. 15 years ago I had my first custom rifle built. 7 mag on sako action. During load dev I was trying different bullets and powders I had on hand. I had some 140 gr barnes TTSX on hand that I had loaded for a friend. The rifle shot everything great but it just loved those barnes. So I tried them. Every deer shot with them through the rib cage ran at least a 100 maybe 150 yds. Which where I was hunting made recovery a bitch. Opening the deer up there was an x pattern through the lungs but very minimal tissue damage. Swapped over to 140 BT. Same velocity at muzzle and roughly at impacts. 100-200 yds. The deer shot with the BT all had an exit but the lungs were soup. The farthest a deer has run was 40 feet. I believe that 100% weight retention bullets do not transfer much energy to the animal unless major bone is impacted. The few BT I have recovered over the years typically had 65-75 weight retention.
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The hornady eldm performs very closely to the BT with my 6.5-06. I generally get golfball to 3" exits and a ton of damage in the wound channel. Most deer are down immediately or within 20 feet.
 
HandgunHTR said:
I should qualify that I tend to shoot smaller cartridges with a suppressor so spotting my shots through the scope and not having to wear hearing protection makes both things much easier. That being said, I haven't had the opportunity to take a 931Y shot on game either, so I cannot definitively say that I would be able to do either on a shot that long.
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You can still hear the sound of the bullet hitting at that range. It just takes it a bit longer to get back to you. I killed a doe earlier this year at 895. I saw the dust fly off the animal. Then about what seemed like 2 seconds later it sounded like a boat paddle hitting the water. I had two guys spotting. All three of us that were there heard it easily. With a suppressor it seems like it's even more pronounced.
 
ObiJohn said:
Yep. A solid has excellent weight retention but not impressive one-shot kills. Bullets lose mass because of energy transfer that exceeds the integral strength of the bullet... and the quarry's tissues are also correspondingly damaged by that energy transfer. Monolithic bullets can be designed to be less resistant to deformation at the tip and more so towards the base. We could call it the Partition Principle, and encourage bullet manufacturers to come up with different solution to the same problem.
Click to expand...
Below is a 175g Terminal Shock DRT (https://drtammo.com/product/drt-terminal-shock-30-cal-175gr-projectile-50pcs/) monolithic fragmenting bullet gel test from a .308 Win that a friend did. This bullet is a compressed metal powder core (https://drtammo.com/drt-technology/) design that performs similarly to a Berger bullet.



Nathan Foster also field-tested this bullet.



 
memtb said:
I can't say that I'm a "heavy for caliber" hunter. But, I'm darn certain that I'm "not" a "light for caliber" hunter…..even with monos! That's been my philosophy since the '60's.

And before someone comments about the year ……that's the 1960's! 😜 memtb
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Oh thank God! I'm not the oldest member on this site! !!!
 
MagnumManiac said:
Oh really. A dyno measures TORQUE.
Horsepower is a mathematical equation using torque and rpm to provide a fictional number. There is no such thing as horsepower.

Cheers.
P.S.
I am a qualified engine builder.
Click to expand...
Not sure if it is useless or no such thing or simply a man made-up number from yet another questionable mathematical calculation that could be proven with the use of horses, but they never prove it, anyway my 84 yr old dad made a good point recently. I bought a new F250 that has 500 hp and 1200lbs tq. Dad said ******** on the HP. I said how so, he said I can hook 250 horses to your truck on each end or even just on one end and they will either pull that truck apart or drag it anywhere they want. Based on that, I would humbly say that HP may be a calculated number, but when it comes to anything other than horses, it is questionable or arbitrary at best. The old man has a good one every now and then. And being a farm boy, he usually has them with simple logic like this one.
 
340Wby-4-everything said:
Not sure if it is useless or no such thing or simply a man made-up number from yet another questionable mathematical calculation that could be proven with the use of horses, but they never prove it, anyway my 84 yr old dad made a good point recently. I bought a new F250 that has 500 hp and 1200lbs tq. Dad said ******** on the HP. I said how so, he said I can hook 250 horses to your truck on each end or even just on one end and they will either pull that truck apart or drag it anywhere they want. Based on that, I would humbly say that HP may be a calculated number, but when it comes to anything other than horses, it is questionable or arbitrary at best. The old man has a good one every now and then. And being a farm boy, he usually has them with simple logic like this one.
Click to expand...
I've driven enough wagons pulled by mules to know that there is horsepower and there is mule power. Now how they arrive at their calculations with a vehicle is certainly beyond my intelligence level. But hook 300 live horses to something and you have a whole lot of power there.
 
James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine, needed a means of selling his new steam engine. He invented HORSEPOWER as a unit, as a gimmick to sell, to show that a steam engine could do the work of many horses……..it stuck.
It is NOT real.
Two internal combustion engines can have identical torque readings, but the one that does so at higher RPM has higher HORSEPOWER, it is meaningless…..
 
Like it or not, regardless of the origin, it is a unit of measurement today that is accepted/recognized globally across various industries. I know it is hard for most people to do, but let's move on and stay on course.
 

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