.45 Weak?

[Nolo]

I'm really not all that familiar with handguns, so bear with me here.
I've been working some numbers on theoretical cartridges when something jumped out at me. .45 ACP is really, really weak. I was running the numbers on what a .40 S&W scaled to .45 caliber would look like, when it came out almost identical in physical size to .45 ACP but with more than twice the energy (it had about 1.5mm more of case, but had the same OAL). I was shocked. I looked up energy and velocity for the .45 ACP +P. It didn't compare. I ran the numbers again. I checked my math, it was good. I looked up the basic math again. It was good. Then I looked up .45 ACP +P's pressure. It was only 2,000 PSI higher than the normal loading! I always knew .45 ACP wasn't loaded like a 9mm or a .40 S&W, but I thought the +P rounds filled that gap.
So my question is, why isn't .45 ACP loaded like it could be? I understand that standard weapons can only handle the pressure they are designed for (hence the difficulties with simply changing the barrel on a .45 ACP to 10mm Auto), but I've seen no evidence of even wildcatters doing this.
Can someone tell me why .45 ACP is so anemic?

 

[antsi]

It's only anemic if you are looking at energy stats. It is highly debatable whether high energy is the key to handgun wounding effectiveness. If you look at penetration and size of the permanent wound channel, .45 ACP is one of the better handgun calibers.

Sure, it would be possible to make a .45 throw a 230 grain bullet at 1800 fps. It would be an extremely large and heavy handgun. It would kick like a mule. It would be very difficult to shoot accurately. So, why do all that when .45 ACP is already as effective as any handgun round?

I'll put it another way - what makes you think that .45 ACP would be more effective doing its job if it were loaded up to higher velocities?

 

[MachIVshooter]

Because 1911's, for which the cartridge was designed, have partially unsuppurted chambers. Look at what keeps happening to Glock's in .40 S&W and .357 Sig. by combining high chamber pressures and barrels that don't have fully supported chambers. I've hot-rodded .45 ACP and blown out case heads in my 1911's (1911's don't KB like Glocks, though)

The .45 Super does just what you speak of, and can be used in many guns with nothing more than a recoil spring change. The S&W 4506 can handle the .45 Super bone stock. .45 Super is capable of 700 FPE (very nearly matching top 10mm performance).

 

[Nolo]

I'll put it another way - what makes you think that .45 ACP would be more effective doing its job if it were loaded up to higher velocities?

A lot of things make me think that.
Like, say, the reason that velocity is important to the equation at all. If .45 wouldn't be more effective at higher velocities, then why don't we just load it to 700 f/s?
500 f/s?
300 f/s?
Oops, I just made a paintball gun.
If you were to load it to higher velocities, you'd need a bullet redesign for sure, but you would most certainly gain something.

 

[Deer Hunter]

The .45 Super is the same dimensions as the .45 ACP. Some will say that the brass is slightly thicker, others will pipe in and say as long as the chamber is supported and your gun doesn't suck it's safe to load normal ACP brass hot. I'm planning on getting my CZ97 tweaked to shoot both ACP and Super loads soon.

 

[Nolo]

MachIVshooter, you answered my question.
They have done what I discovered, I just wasn't looking in the right place.
I was mostly just flabbergasted that there would be such a gaping performance hole there with nothing to fill it.
Turns out I just hadn't seen the caulk.

 

[mikec]

Maybe because JMB was working with only slide rules and paper when he designed the round back in what, 1905??

The round was designed around powders that were available back then.

Remember, there are some guns out there that are coming close to being 100 years old in that caliber. rather risk blowing a gun up, the ammo makers are sticking to loads they know are safe.

 

[Wildfire]

Numbers Lie.

Hey:
If you are playing a numbers game there other rounds that should be considered wimps too. The .22 rim fire has very little on the power end but I hear hurts like
Numbers are just numbers . The .45 ACP was chosen by our military because it was a man stopper. Since then they have let new people in there that now play numbers games also.

 

[Nolo]

Maybe because JMB was working with only slide rules and paper when he designed the round back in what, 1905??

The round was designed around powders that were available back then.

Remember, there are some guns out there that are coming close to being 100 years old in that caliber. rather risk blowing a gun up, the ammo makers are sticking to loads they know are safe.

All Browning did was cut a .30-06 case to 23mm. And I thought of that, but then I looked at 9mm Luger: 35,000 PSI, designed in 1902 (I think, it may be '06) and I've never heard of the pressure changing significantly since then.

Numbers are just numbers. The .45 ACP was chosen by our military because it was a man stopper. Since then they have let new people in there that now play numbers games also.

The .45 ACP was chosen because the military brass thought that diameter was the only piece of the stopping power equation (which may not have been a terrible assumption, given the time period). They also thought we needed a 3,000 meter range in 1951. And they thought they had to have a .30 caliber bullet to do that.
The military has thought a lot of things. Not all of them (some might say not most of them) right.

My question has been answered, however.

 

[mikec]

I don't have any early 9mm barrels so I don't know if any had more steel in the chamber area then the 1911. Perhaps JMB had some recoil wimps in his testing group? Maybe just being adequate was good enough for the military in 1905?


Then again we have the advantage of almost 100 years and computers to debate this.

 

[Nolo]

Certainly.

 

[wally]

I looked at 9mm Luger: 35,000 PSI, designed in 1902 (I think, it may be '06)

I'd always thought the 9mm was some carefully chosen optimum to get the most energy in the smallest bullet/cartridge. But according to the History Channel's "Tales of the Gun" when the German military demanded a larger diameter bullet than the .30Mauser he'd used initially he just cut off the bottle neck and crammed in the largest bullet that'd fit thereby minimizing the changes to the rest of the production line.

He did make a Luger in .45ACP for US military trials, but when the German orders came in he had more business than he could handle and withdrew from the US trials. The surviving .45 Luger is a true "million dollar gun"

--wally.

 

[1911 guy]

Energy "formulas"? Bah.

Every one of them is skewed toward velocity. Run the numbers of the cartridges those old timers took to Africa. If you look at the numbers only, they should have been using .22-250 and .243 for eland and rhino.

 

[antsi]

A lot of things make me think that.
Like, say, the reason that velocity is important to the equation at all. If .45 wouldn't be more effective at higher velocities, then why don't we just load it to 700 f/s?
500 f/s?
300 f/s?
Oops, I just made a paintball gun.
If you were to load it to higher velocities, you'd need a bullet redesign for sure, but you would most certainly gain something.

Yes, and conversely, if you could load the .45 ACP up to high enough velocity, you could make it powerful enough to shoot at the moon and pulverize it into dust with one shot.

Obviously, very low velocities are going to dramatically decrease effectiveness. That does not mean that increasing velocity higher and higher will always result in corresponding improvements in wounding effectiveness.

Like everything else in design, there will be a point of diminishing returns where increasing the velocity buys you increasingly more inconvenience and un-shoot-ability with less and less benefit in terms of wounding effectiveness. At some point, you will only be increasingly fragmenting your own projectile or penetrating out the other side of your target. Neither of these effects is likely to help you stop an assailant.

After a hundred years or so of tweaking and experimenting and shooting people, folks have found that by and large, the .45 acp is about as effective on human sized targets as any other handgun cartridge, and that the balance it achieves between shootability/carryability/practicality and wounding effectiveness is pretty close to optimal.

If you think you can make a handgun that will be substantially more effective, without excessively sacrificing practical factors, by loading .45 ACP up to 2500 fps or whatever magic energy number you think will work, go ahead. I will not be holding my breath waiting for everone to discard their .45s to buy handguns chambered in ".45 Nolo."

 

[Nolo]

Every one of them is skewed toward velocity. Run the numbers of the cartridges those old timers took to Africa. If you look at the numbers only, they should have been using .22-250 and .243 for eland and rhino.

I disagree. They are not skewed towards velocity, it's just looking at energy. It's physics, bud. E=MC^2. Energy equals mass times celeriter (speed) squared. Naturally, if you increase speed by only a small amount, you get drastic results. Unless you think Einstein had it in for big-bore hunters, you need to rethink that statement.

only be increasingly fragmenting

Time and time again, this quality has been shown to be the most devastating to human targets. Hence the Glaser Safety Slug. I don't get your point.

.45 ACP up to 2500 fps

Hyperbolizing my argument up to ridiculous proportions doesn't help. I'm rapidly losing patience for your belligerence.
I'm not saying we should increase the velocity of the .45 ACP, I was merely shocked that no one had exploited that gap in pressure yet. Turns out they already had. Question answered.

 

[TAB]

Something else that needs to be remembered about the 45 acp is it was designed to meet a miltary spec of .45 bullet diamenter and 850 fps. You have to look into the history of the time, you will see that we had just had a conflict in which every one had 38s... and it would not always stop charging enemy forces. In the late 18XXs, bigger was always better when it came to bullets, so natuerally the army made that part of the spec to even be consitered in testing.

 

[Nolo]

Yes, TAB, I do remember that. In 1909, 21,000 PSI was a quite reasonable pressure. I was merely wondering why no one had exploited the gap. Now I'm not.

 

[rcmodel]

I'm really not all that familiar with handguns, so bear with me here.

Well, that right there is your problem!


The .45 ACP was in 1911, and still is today, just about the hardest kicking handgun round an average troop can be trained to fight with.

That makes it even better for an "experts" gun, because recoil is so manageable that they can double-tap a BG or three, and put the bullets in almost the same holes.

Any modern-day gunfighter will bypass vastly more powerful rounds such as the .44 Magnum, because they simply can't control it for fast follow-up shots. And even if they could, stopping power would not be much if any greater then it already is with the .45 ACP. Any vast increase in energy would simply be wasted on the landscape behind the target!

See, you can only kill someone so dead, and deader doesn't make it any better, especially if you can't control the gun.


rcmodel

 

[Nolo]

Well, that right there is your problem!

Trust me, rcmodel, I know.
I want to shoot more!

 

[HisSoldier]

As my gunsmith said, "John Browning got it right the first time". Of course he had earlier designs, but many would argue that the .45 ACP was one of his best, it does what's asked of it, a cartridge/bullet that has a high one shot stopping probability, is relatively easy to manage, and, in the 1911, very accurate.

Today, as then, many of us don't trust European ideas about guns or politics.

 

[mljdeckard]

Keep in mind, the cartridge is over 100 years old. Put it in the context of what it is designed to compete with.

The .40 has more ME than the .45, remember that the reason it exists, is that the FBI guys testing the 10mm realized that they could significantly reduce the powder charge and STILL have more energy than a 9mm or a .45. Then another genius realized that if you are reducing the powder charge anyway, there was no reason to have a case so long it wouldn't fit in existing frames, so they reduced it to a length that would fit into existing 9mm frames, with the same amount of powder, and named it the .40 S&W.

It's interesting to note that ALL pistol cartridges are weak, and there really isn't much difference between them. the range for all defensive pistol cartridges is 9-11 mm. Doesn't seem like much at all, until you remember that a .45 has literally twice the weight of a 9mm. (230 gr v 115 gr.) The extra diameter means bigger expansion with jhp ammo, as well as more diameter even if it DOESN'T expand. Having grown up in southern Utah, my math skills leave me with no patience to spell out the equation, but an 11mm bullet does a LOT more tissue damage than a 9mm bullet. Especially with multiple hits.

If muzzle energy was the ONLY criteria to determine an effective cartridge, we would have ditched everything but 10mm and magnum revolver cartridges a LONG time ago.

 

[Majic]

The .45 acp was designed back around 1900 to match the .45 Colt but in the new semi-auto pistol. Wildcatters have done a lot of work with the cartridge but they still had to stay within the design confines of the available platforms.

 

[Youngster]

I like the fact that .45 is loaded to such a low pressure, it makes things much easier on the shooter, gun and cases while still offering more performance potential than any reasonably common pistol round other than the 10mm.

 

[MICHAEL T]

Leave it alone The 45 has more than proven its self around the world. I bought a 40 fired 1 box and sold it. I rather have a 9mm than that POS round.
FPS, ftlbs, don't mean a whole lot when its for real. 45 has been working for almost a 100 yrs. Tell my Great grandchildren how good the 40 is in a 100 years.They might listen as their cleaning my handed down 1911's . But I don't think so See they will have 200 yrs of proven record to back them.

 

[Deer Hunter]

If the .45 is ok, then a faster .45 is even better. As long as you are comfortable with it and can fire it straight, I don't see a problem. I can understand the mantra of "If it aint broke, don't fix it". But in all honesty, it wouldn't be trying to fix it. Only improving it. I like to think of it like an internet connetion. Dial-up works fine, but I'm definantly not going back to it.

I don't think the .45 ACP has much wrong with it, but I like experimenting and I think the .45 Super is a wonderful idea.