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.

 

[Turpentine21]

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.

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.

 

[RichCoyle]

It's a given the bullet MUST entertain the vitals. Otherwise all bets are off. Makes sense to me to "Hedge" your bet a little with a bullet that has little chance to fail. It may be obvious by now I am an incontrivertible Partition fan.

You haven't tried Hammers yet.

 

[FEENIX]

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.

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.