Taylor Knockout Scale

Wasn't this the one that rated a slow rolling bowling ball as a true "stopper"?

John "Pondoro" Taylor may have been a bit excentric. But he had shot a lot of game (legally and not). While his experience led to his system, it should not be taken without some examination.

I understand it's a good scale to meaure the **minimun** performance you can expect from a bullet. No account for shape, construction, design, tendency to tumble mushroom or fragment.

Weight x Terminal Velocity X Calibre /7000

I'd say that anyone who poached as much Ivory as Pondoro should be entitled to his beliefs.

What did Karamojo Bell use a 6.5 mm Manlicher?

from hrer http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk/ballistics.htm

"This brings us onto the subject of penetration. This is not just to do with military armour, but also against tough animals like elephants or water buffalo. As already indicated, early big game hunters found that the most important characteristics of a bullet against such tough game were that it should be round-nosed, strongly built, and have a good SD. A pointed bullet would not follow a straight path through a mass of bone, and one with too high a velocity also often followed an erratic path. Amazingly, one of the most successful early elephant guns (albeit only in very skilled hands) was the little 6.5mm Mannlicher. Why? Because its very long, 160 grain (10.4g), round-nosed bullet and its moderate velocity allowed it to penetrate remarkable thicknesses of bone - but it was only effective with a precise aim."

The TKO is overused by modern writers who want to sound sophisticated. Taylor derived his "values" by observation of elephants shot in the head but not immediately killed. Extrapolation to a deer rifle does nothing except to show you wouldn't want to hunt elephants with one. Extrapolation to a pistol calibre is meaningless. Extrapolation to a bowling ball is silly.

W.D.M. Bell gets a lot of ink for use of a .256 but it is less often mentioned that he moved from that to a .275 Rigby and on from there to a .318 Westley Richards. He was shooting elephants with no experience of men with firearms and could set up brain shots so as to not need "knockout" power. He was also a fine shot and apparently without nerves. He is reported to have shot one elephant out of a herd and then climbed up its body to snipe the rest.

I think that what's significant is that it's not based on 'muzzle energy!', but momentum. Velocity isn't squared, as it would be for kinetic energy. And I have to say that momentum is a real force that exists with moving objects, and it makes sense to take it into account.

I agree...Useless information, but fun to play with for a minute or two . The information that it gives for the few handgun stats that I ran through it didn't even come close to actual handgun one-shot-stop stats. I would be a bit worried about trusting it with rifle stats that were life and death. And hunting can be just that. . Handguns also.

It's minimal performance, the very least you can expect.

For when your HP doesn't expand, when your FMJ doesn't fragmentm when your round-nose doesn't tumble, that's what it is.

IRL bullets can fragment and tumble and expand, but this model doesn't care about that. It's just momentum and diameter and mass, pure and simple. I like it. I don't know much, but I think one needs multiple tools and if you have half a dozen different 'performance' calculators like that, each with a different formula, then you ought to get a Real good perspective.

Or maybe someday someone will come out with the bullet 'Unifying formula', a theory of everything for terminal ballistics Until then I'd say 6 different independent formulas isn't too bad.

Make sure you know the whole story about why and how the Taylor system was developed. Bell use a 6.5 Mannlicher and 7x7. HOWEVER the part of the story usually not repeated is that he happened to be one of the best shots in Africa and he knew elephant anatomy better than anyone else. The full jacketed bullets of those cartridges had great SD and could penetrate deeply. He could then place a bullet into the brain from any angle !!

There is a story out there about the chap who bagged 2 elephants with a .22 Long rifle. The first appears to be a fluke catching it through the armpit and disrupting the major vessels atop the heart. He shot the second with witnesses to prove it could be done. I don't recall the sorce but I belive it to be Capstick.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't TKO completely ignore the critical role of sectional density?

Besides which, SHOOING IS NOT BOXING. There is no such thing as "knockout" power. Placement is always going to be critical, since the only way to kill any animal on the planet in short order is either through critical CNS damage or massive blood loss leading to shock. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY TO KILL SOMETHING QUICKLY! You can't just "knock it out" with ft. lbs., at least not with anything this side of an nitro express.

If you have no air that's a problem too, 3 ways imo, repiratory circulatory nervous.

And I thought it was Taylor knock-down formula, TKO might be the real name, but it sounds cartoonish.

And it's clearly not a perfect formula, but if you use it along with many other statistics it should add quite a bit. Just another column on the old spreadsheet, but pretty nifty one.

C'mon, momentum is important, how could it not be? He's just showing you a ratio of momentum and diameter.

I would belive that the average marksman would be courting a good stomping going afte ivory with a pea shooter.

The force of the bullet isn't the critical factor--it's what tissue gets destroyed.

Uh Cosmoline, he was using a nitro express, that's the point.

He knew his elepant anatomy, too, but as a commercial ivory poacher, he could not be as choosy about his shots as Bell. He fudged his formula until he got something that agreed with his direct observations of how long an elephant hit in the head but not penetrating to the brain would be literally knocked out. A stiff bullet of good sectional density was assumed. He knew better than to try to stretch his concept: "I have only worked out the Knock-Out value of certain small bores to show that they cannot be considered safe weapons to take against dangerous game at close quarters in thick cover... If you are lucky enough to find your elephant in the open, you can still kill him just as easily with a .275 as you could with a .577; but the point is that you mighty seldom find your elephant so obliging. Nowadays they spend the daylight hours in thick brush and heavy forest."

'African Rifles and Cartridges' pretty well stays in print. Easy to check out what Taylor himself really said. Harder to tell if it is true, but don't try to make him say what he did not.

According to Taylor, Bell stood on a ladder to get above the elephant grass where the tops of jumbos' heads were peaking up like islands in the sea. One bullet per "island" usually did the trick and the pachyderms never realized their brethren were hit.

But the only reason a larger bullet is better is because it destroys more tissue. The raw ft. lbs. do nothing to a large animal. An elephant itself generates far more energy when it knocks a tree down.

Taylor's original application of Knock-Out was literally that. If you shoot an elephant in the head and do not get into the brain, the only tissue destroyed is bone. He claimed that a heavy enough blow would literally knock the animal out long enough for you to make another shot. I quote again:
"If you take a frontal head shot at an elephant with a .416 and miss the brain by a small amount, you will probably not knock him out. His hindquarters will give way and he will squat there like a huge hog for a few moments then, if you don't finish him off at once, he will heave to his feet again, slew around, and clear off. But if you had taken the shot with the .470, and missed the brain by the same amount, that elephant would have been knocked out entirely, unconscious, and would have remained down for anything up to about five minutes-yet the theoretical energies of the rifles are the same."

[.416 Ko = 57, .470 Ko = 70. He later says a .577 of Ko 126 will knock out an elephant for 25 minutes and a 600 at Ko 150 for 30 or more.]

That explains more. It really is a specific matter of doing enough damage to the head as a whole to cause the elephant to drop even if the brain is not directly hit. I'm not sure why anyone would expect this to have application to other animals--other than as part of the very basic proposition that a bigger bullet moving faster will do more damage than a smaller one moving slower.

ok.... to clarify for the last time, what it shows is - oh fk it.

Mzl NRG Roxors my boxors!

Oh my, some seem to be suggesting that writers makes stuff up to fill inches of column!

I'm going to invent the "Cosmoline Lethality Index" (CLI) that will assign higher numbers to bullets that are bigger and move faster. Can I be famous if I do?

Maybe only for 15 minutes.
I know of an obscure scale of about 20 years ago that you could tweak a little and name for yourself without having to do a lot of shooting and math.