Well, I feel like this thread has wandered a little off my initial question (I really was just looking for gun suggestions/experience), but WTH.
The Civil War was fought with larger, heavier, slower moving, lead bullets. The stats were (and still are) not all that impressive; however, look at the human carnage those big heavy slow-moving Minié balls wrought upon both sides!
And the Battle of Crecy was fought with longbows, and the French were annihilated! I understand your point, but it's not accurate. Rifled muskets, etc were certainly state of the art and adequate
for the time, but to imagine that tech hasn't changed or that we have greater expectations today is a little silly
Military use with hardball is completely and utterly irrelevant. In that example, they are all pretty equally dismal.
I was referring to rifle rounds (SCHV is usually used in that context)
Measurably in what way? Maybe on paper, to those who have never drawn blood with a handgun.
I certainly don't claim to have ever fired on a
man (thankfully), but I have shot a fair number of things in the deer and wolf family with revolvers and autoloader (my twin cousins are big handgun hunters, though I don't personally own any of that kind of hardware myself), as well as a couple of pig carcasses, courtesy of my neighbor. Now, I'm no trauma surgeon, but the 10mm seemed to do consistently more damage in terms of wound size, shredding of tissue, and cracking bones and such, than the .45ACP. It also does better in gel tests (though some people consider that neither here nor there). General ballistic calculations also support this (which should of course be taken with a grain of salt, but aren't necessarily
wrong)
No, it isn't. You need to think deeper, to its logical conclusion. This whole line of thought is riddled with contradictions. If stopping power is a myth, then there would be no terminal difference between a .25ACP and a .50AE....We need to move away from this crap about energy and the whole notion of one shot stops....Bigger bullets that create larger wounds and greater tissue destruction simply improve the odds of stopping the assailant more quickly.
I think we are very much in agreement here. Perhaps I made a mistake earlier when I waded into the definitions of "stopping power" and "knockdown power" and kind of mixed signals. What I was really trying to get at is your earlier comment:
Energy doesn't make up for diameter and mass, ever but especially in handguns. [my emphasis]
- This is simply not
true. A 200g .338 Lapua (3300 fps) is going to do a hell of a lot more damage to a human than a 405g .45-70 (1395 fps). Why? Energy. This is a pretty basic concept of physics. This is not to say that slow & heavy doesn't have it's uses. And of course bullet construction, angle, target and situational specifics all matter, but energy kills. Even in handguns, were the velocity range is much smaller than rifles, this can come in to play: A 210g .41 magnum at 1550 fps is going to do things to a man that a 255g .45 ACP +P at 925 fps just cant. So your statement that energy
never makes for diameter and mass is backwards; diameter and mass can
occasionally make up for lower energy.
Have you taken a look at the .460 Rowland?
Sam
I have, and it looks like a good round, but not for a carry gun (a little too much pop and blast). Also, the conversion process is very involved, and then you're stuck with just that caliber.