Effective Game Killing

[ObiJohn]

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.

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.

 

[Turpentine21]

I do not have his books, but Bryan Litz covers it extensively.

Thank you for that. I'll take a look. It may take a level of reading comprehension far above my IQ but I'll give it a shot.

 

[Turpentine21]

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.

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.