patentnonsense
Member
Besides retinal damage, I believe you can also get nerve problems in your cervical vertebrae which will end your shooting career. I'm not sure of the medical details, but Donald Hamilton was one notable example.
Typical 50BMG rifle weights run around 30 lbs for anything that's going to be carried - the Marine Corps sniper rifle (from some company whose name I can never remember, KMT or some such) actually has a detachable barrel, so the spotter can hump half the load.
There are "funsie 50s" which are lighter, but you'll notice they tend to have really short barrels - less bullet energy hence less recoil energy. (I've heard that 50BMG cartridge and loadings were originally developed for the 45" barrel length, so lengths below 36 mean that a huge amount of energy is wasted.)
Recoil energy is nearly proportional to muzzle energy times the ratio of bullet weight to total gun weight. (I say nearly proportional because this ignores any disproportion between propellant mass and muzzle energy.) This rule of thumb isn't precise, but lets you get a quick idea.
Just for fun I ran my own recoil tables with some military rounds which have been shoulder-fired at one time or another -
If we take a 55-grain load in .223 as a baseline (ME=1280 ft-lb), then we get the following rough numbers for how kick scales up with bigger and/or hotter rounds:
.308: 7 times as much, for equal weight guns;
.338 Lapua: 17 times as much, for equal weight guns;
.458 Win Mag: 36 times as much;
and then it gets fun: taking ME and bullet weights for some military cartridges, we get
for a sample ball load in 50 BMG, 117 times as much; (i.e. a 50BMG rifle would have to weigh 120 pounds to kick as little as a 7-pound .308);
Steyr's 15.2 AMR was a proposed NATO anti-material rifle which would have fired a tungsten dart, and I think was planned as a two-man weapon of some sort: >200 times as much;
the Russian 14.5x114 (a WW2 antitank-rifle round): >300 times as much:
for 20x82 (the MG151 cartridge, which I think is the 20mm round the Lahti and Solothurn rifles fired): >500 times as much;
and, just to be totally outrageous: somebody has offered reloading dies for 23x115NS, which is an aircraft cannon round, and if anybody were insane enough to put this into a rifle it would kick more than 1300 times as much as the 223!
Following are the bullet and ME values I used to figure this:
cartridge grains ME kick energy (scaled to .223)
223 55 1280 1
308 180 2745 7
338L 250 5007 18
458 510 4945 36
50 BMG 662 12488 117
14.5x114 980 22360 311
15.2 AMR 540 27225 209
20x82 1698 21090 509
23x115NS 2699 35446 1359
Thinking about these big rounds is entertaining - but firing a 6-lb .338 Lapua prone - now that's scary!
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Typical 50BMG rifle weights run around 30 lbs for anything that's going to be carried - the Marine Corps sniper rifle (from some company whose name I can never remember, KMT or some such) actually has a detachable barrel, so the spotter can hump half the load.
There are "funsie 50s" which are lighter, but you'll notice they tend to have really short barrels - less bullet energy hence less recoil energy. (I've heard that 50BMG cartridge and loadings were originally developed for the 45" barrel length, so lengths below 36 mean that a huge amount of energy is wasted.)
Recoil energy is nearly proportional to muzzle energy times the ratio of bullet weight to total gun weight. (I say nearly proportional because this ignores any disproportion between propellant mass and muzzle energy.) This rule of thumb isn't precise, but lets you get a quick idea.
Just for fun I ran my own recoil tables with some military rounds which have been shoulder-fired at one time or another -
If we take a 55-grain load in .223 as a baseline (ME=1280 ft-lb), then we get the following rough numbers for how kick scales up with bigger and/or hotter rounds:
.308: 7 times as much, for equal weight guns;
.338 Lapua: 17 times as much, for equal weight guns;
.458 Win Mag: 36 times as much;
and then it gets fun: taking ME and bullet weights for some military cartridges, we get
for a sample ball load in 50 BMG, 117 times as much; (i.e. a 50BMG rifle would have to weigh 120 pounds to kick as little as a 7-pound .308);
Steyr's 15.2 AMR was a proposed NATO anti-material rifle which would have fired a tungsten dart, and I think was planned as a two-man weapon of some sort: >200 times as much;
the Russian 14.5x114 (a WW2 antitank-rifle round): >300 times as much:
for 20x82 (the MG151 cartridge, which I think is the 20mm round the Lahti and Solothurn rifles fired): >500 times as much;
and, just to be totally outrageous: somebody has offered reloading dies for 23x115NS, which is an aircraft cannon round, and if anybody were insane enough to put this into a rifle it would kick more than 1300 times as much as the 223!
Following are the bullet and ME values I used to figure this:
cartridge grains ME kick energy (scaled to .223)
223 55 1280 1
308 180 2745 7
338L 250 5007 18
458 510 4945 36
50 BMG 662 12488 117
14.5x114 980 22360 311
15.2 AMR 540 27225 209
20x82 1698 21090 509
23x115NS 2699 35446 1359
Thinking about these big rounds is entertaining - but firing a 6-lb .338 Lapua prone - now that's scary!
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