Rand, as you know, human tissue is not homogeneous, or: "oops! You left the bones out of my Jello."
I completely agree....but as far as "flesh" goes, the gel is accurate.
According to the old FBI site, and I hope someone can repost that link because I'm two days after a bad reformat and a loss of all my favorites/links, the gel can be adjusted up and down. I had started to write that out but I can't recall all the entries so I edited it.
Two inches of human fat tissue is equal to one half inch of ballistic gel. Two layer clothing (shirt and jacket) is equal to less than a half inch. Organ tissue is 1/3 of muscle tissue. Upper body bone (sternum, vertabrae, skull etc) is something like 1.5 times as dense as muscle (not entirely sure on this one). Lower body bones are two for one muscle tissue etc.
An average, not heavily overweight male, shot in the center of his chest at say, ten feet, you would have one inch of gel representing his fat tissue and clothing, one inch of muscle is one inch of gel (two inches of gel penetration thus far with four inches remaining on a 6" penetration), his sternum/ribs would be approx 1 and 1/2" of gel (three and a half inches of gel penetration), and the last two and a half inches of gel penetration would represent 7 and 1/2" of heart, trachea, nerves, lungs, various organs.
That 6" penetration in ballistic gel, dead center mass, would pretty much have the pellets bouncing off his spinal column after having shreaded his heart/lungs etc.
Those 6" penetration shots aren't individual pellets as so many folks want to say, either. A #6 shot at ten feet leaves a hole approx 4" wide and the same deep before the pellets take up individual pathways. That shreads a heart. It's big enough to park a baseball inside of. As one fellow pointed out, (I wish I could find his name but my screen's all weird), and you often see it in those gel shots, the destroyed pathway is so wide and so deep that the plastic wad often penetrates as deep as the shot pellets.
richard
