Ballistic charts vs. Real World results

[John828]

I must be going to Disneyland then because I sight in at 50 yards for a certain distance and that covers me for three hundred yards if I do my part. If the buck of my den's dreams comes across my path at a greater distance then I can discern, I either take the shot or not depending on whether I think I can hit him where I need to or not.

Otherwise, according to some responses all I need to do is believe the 'puter.

Look, real world is far different to computer simulations (mostly.) If you take a shot that is beyond your reach, I truly hope you miss. Better a clean miss than an inhumane wound. I am certainly not a damn treehugger/bambi lover, but shoot and learn your rifle and then shoot your rifle some more. No problems after that.

 

[elmerfudd]

I don't hunt a lot of deer as my wife doesn't like to cook it, but I do hunt a lot of rabbits, crows and strangely enough peacocks, (my sister has a flock of them that seems to need continual thinning). I hunt those out to 100 yards and most of the time I take headshots. When you're trying to connect at 70 yards with an airgun, (which I did yesterday), you need to know your holdover. The kill zone is maybe 1" square, the far zero is at 50 yards, so to hit that kill zone you need to know your exact holdover. I do, but just in case I also have it written down right on top of my scope.

If you've physically verified that your ballistics software is accurate, it saves a lot of shooting. It also enables you to know your holdover at distances you probably don't get a chance to shoot at, (most ranges don't have targets at 250 yards). You do have to shoot a few groups though and verify that they are where they're supposed to be, (I actually do that first), as sometimes the predictions aren't right.

Now if all you're shooting are deer and elk within 300 yards, then it's probably not a major issue, but for other animals like ground squirrels or coyotes I'd want to know the trajectories of my centerfires the same way I know the trajectories of my rimfires and airguns.

 

[John828]

Mr. Fudd,

If I were't drunk, I'd call you out on the carpet on all your typing.

John828

 

[benEzra]

A .223 hits with 1300 ft-lbs at about 1000m/s with 62 gr out to 400 meters. A 7.62x39 hits with about 1600 ft-lbs will going a bit less than 800m/s and weighing 123 gr will going out to about 280 meters.

A 62-grain .223 at 400 meters is going 559 m/s with 463 ft/lb (0.63 kJ) of energy, not 1300. Not sure if that was what you meant.

 

[elmerfudd]

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that these programs are out there, many are available for free and so long as you verify their accuracy by shooting a few groups at different ranges you can gain an extremely detailed knowledge of your rifles trajectory and that will be helpful for whatever kind of shooting you like to do.

There's really no downside to it.

 

[tblt]

I shoot a 7 X 57 with ballistic tip 120 gr and speer 130 gr.
My gun is 26 years old and I have killed many deer with it
I used to shoot remington factory loads till I had a bullet bend so now I only shoot reloads do to the extra 3 to 4 hundred feet per second

 

[saturno_v]

John, my comment on your first message.

In my opinion (shared by many others) in every industry you hit a plateau in terms of what progress can do within that specific technological paradigm.

Call it law of dininishing returns..

Let me give you an example in other industries..

Take Cars....

The real fast progress lasted till the beginning the 80's..high output and increasingly smaller displacement engines, air conditioning and climate control systems become ubiquitous, aerodynamic drastically improved (the average drag coefficient went from an average of mid high 0.40 in the 70's to 0.30 with peak of 0.28 int he 80's), ABS, stability control, general adoption of front wheel drive, increasing diffusion of all wheel drive systems, multi speaker stereo systems, heated seats....even the performance of the smallest car were significantly higher of the legal and realistic traffic limits.

From the early 90's to today what really progressed in cars?? Yes we have GPS systems (developed indipendently from the car industry) so we do not get lost, you can connect your Ipod to the stereo system, a bit brighter lights (the HID lamps) and in some models you can get your butt cheecks massaged..that's it, pretty much. Aerodynamic did not improve a bit since more than 20 years.

I drove the BMW 535i of a friend of mine, an early 90's model (more than 15 years old)....powerful, great road manners, silent and fast..I compared to my co-worker BMW 530 he just bought...really not much difference apart for few more electronic gizmos...compare that old 535 with the car in the same category from the same producer 16 years earlier...the early 533...significantly less performance, bad road manners, no climate control, less space, no ABS and stability control...abysmal brakes...

Airplanes

In the arly 70's the entire world was already flying with B747s and DC-10s....queit, spacious wide body, around Mach 0.8 of cruising speed....what we still flying 40 years latter?? You guessed, a revised and tweaked version of the 747......what people were flying only 20 years before the 747??? Noisy, crammed, slow, fault prone propeller planes and flying boats....within the self imposed limit of subsonic speed there is not much left to do other than improve fuel efficiency and drop few more Decibel of noise

The same thing it's happening to the computer industry..

Reading a lot of books and talking to a lot of people about firearms, my opinion is that the lightning fast progress days of the industry stopped in the early 20th century...think about it...mechanically wise by that time we did already have pump action, semi auto (blowback, recoil and gas operated), bolt action, lever, etc.. same as today.

With the discovery of the smokeless powder at the end of the 19th century muzzle velocities jumped enormously...in the very early days of the 1900's we already reached and passed 3300 fps...look at the 8 mm Mauser cartridge....if you did not know much about guns how can you tell if it was developed in 1898 or in 1998???
In the same period we designed the spitzer boat tail bullets which is still considered the best aerodynamical shape for long range shooting.

The WSM have been marketed as great innovation but if you look at the 7.62 X 54R short and fat case 110 years before it look impressively similar and was designed in that way for the same reasons (burning behavior and ease of extraction)

Even minor tweaks like the staggered double row magazines (Browning HP) are among us since very long time.
Many shooters swear that the best defence cartridge around is the 45 ACP and the armies of the entire world still use the 9 mm Parabellum as cartridge for their standard sidearm...incidentally, both are more than 100 years old....

What guns people were using 100 years before the end of 19th century/early 1900's??

Impractical, mile-long, snail pace loading smoothbore muzzleloading black powder rifles with laughable ballistics...


Even on the accuracy front, not very impressive gains....there are some early century competition rifles that are exceptionally accurate with elaborate barrel forging.
Did we have improvement since the beginning of the 20th century?? Sure we did...guns become lighter, more egonomical, cheaper to mass produce.
Bullet technology improved very dramatically...

Cartridge ballistics didn't improve at the same pace though...we can reach very ultra high velocity with our current day enormous cases...but how much more powder you need in a 300 Weatherby Magnum cartridge to reach, in the end, "only" 300 fps more or so compared to the venerable 30-06??

The 30-378 or the 300 RUM can add another 200 fps or so on top of that....but the amount of powder increases almost esponentially....not to mention the barrel burning problem.
We will approach the limits of what chemical propellent can do...at that point we will need a paradigm shift (rail guns?? Plasma?? who knows...)

What we can say is that the last 100 years of progress in gun technology do not look as impressive as the 100 years before...

 

[mordechaianiliewicz]

Ballistics charts to me mean alot when you are talking about bullet drop and compensation. In terminal ballistics, everything is tendency, and (with high powered rifles) factors like hydrostatic shock that are incredibly dificult to measure.

Very few people argue about how much a .223 62 grain Nosler is going to drop at 300 yards. We argue for hours, and days and years as to it's effect on a coyote, whitetail, human.

 

[John828]

Ballistics charts to me mean alot when you are talking about bullet drop and compensation. In terminal ballistics, everything is tendency, and (with high powered rifles) factors like hydrostatic shock that are incredibly dificult to measure.

Very few people argue about how much a .223 62 grain Nosler is going to drop at 300 yards. We argue for hours, and days and years as to it's effect on a coyote, whitetail, human.

Ballistically speaking, that was closest answer to match my charts except for tendency. What did you mean by

In terminal ballistics, everything is tendency

 

[mordechaianiliewicz]

John828:

People have been hosed down with five 7.92x57mm bullets and lived, not crippled, and to a full healthy life.

Cape Buffalo have been killed from a single .22 round.

Is either likely. Nope.

Generally, we can agree getting hit with multiple high velocity rifle rounds will kill you 99.9% of the time. Generally we can agree that a .22 will only piss off a cape buffalo.

But, in terminal ballistics, we can argue over the "most" effective round when the argument is like this:

.270 or 7mm-08
30.06 or 7.62x54R
7mm Remington Magnum or .300 Winchester Magnum

The difference between all of these rounds in terms of ballistic performance against their given targets is close enough in effect that there can be a real argument (though to me, all of those cartridges are so close in their effects terminally, it's more about personal taste, but I digress).

The arguments also get stretched.

.223 vs. .308: .223 advocates tell you their bullet fragments, yaws, and causes massive hydrostatic shock.
.308 advocates tell you that .308 puts a big hole in you, and causes massive damage from it's weight, and diameter.
Both sides eventually talk about a study they read, or an example. (Well Fackler said this, or my brother shot a deer with a .223 Remington, and it dropped after one step, or the Marines in Mogadishu hit 'em with .223s 25 times, and they just kept on moving, but when it was .308 their bodies dissolved. And so on, and so forth)

Basically, all bullets are deadly. But some TEND to kill better, or more often than others.

Sometimes, the difference is stark as in .22 vs. 8mm Mauser.

Other times it is 7.5 Swiss vs. 6.5 Swede.

Or the much more lively .223 vs. .308

Regardless of what you end up believing, it's all about tendencies.The moment a bullet enters a body, anything can happen. Biological media is very different from person or animal within the same species, let alone different species, and the laws of physics, while constant impart a variety of effects into how the bullet is going to act. Some things are obvious: Hydrostatic shock can tear a liver into pieces. It will rip a lung, but the doctors might even be able to save that lung, depending on circumstances of the wound. That's just the difference of tissues. Age is a factor. I'm 26, and I can bench 250. My grandmother is 91, and has trouble standing. I'd fair better in getting shot, but there are no guarantees. (And neither of us is going to volunteer for that experiment )

 

[Ignition Override]

benEzra:

This might be a trivial pursuit, as I'm new at this, especially for my age.
A guy's Mini 30 on a good Youtube video (enter "Mini 30 420 yards") describes his x39 round having about 566 ft-lbs. at 420 yards. his numbers indicate that the round loses about three-fourths of its energy by then.
Maybe he loads his own or does not use Russian ammo?

It surprises me that the much faster .223 does not have more at that range.

 

[John828]

Mordechai:

I hear you.

I originally started this thread because I started seeing a lot of threads that reminded me of when I was twelve. See, I loved everything guns, but my dad refused to shoot anything but a shotgun because his brother in law shot a cousin with a 308 in the deer woods. My dad sold his rifle the next week and they became taboo.

Short story is that I would beg, borrow or loot every gun mag or hunting catalogue or whatever I could get my hands on. So at my mom's place, I'd pore over these and lust after guns I thought I would never own. One thing I loved was comparing ballistics and dreaming and scheming of which caliber I would choose.

Fast forward twenty-five years and I find myself in a season of life where I can have almost any firearm I desire and have built a modest collection for casual target shooting and hunting.

I feel confident in caliber choice and even own a caliber that when I was child, I could not have imagined I would ever hunt with. It's rainbow trajectory combined with less than impressive power does not take away from that fact that it puts down game reliably when used within its limits.

I was feeling particular curmudgeonly the night I ranted the original post. After thinking about it, I felt like I might have been pouring water on some budding fires. I would have hated it if someone came along when I was twelve and told me my caliber picks were based on theory, put your magazines away, and be quiet.

 

[jpwilly]

The charts are pretty accurate if you shoot from the same length bbl that they use for testing. But every rifle will shoot at different velocities and therefore YMMV.

 

[benEzra]

This might be a trivial pursuit, as I'm new at this, especially for my age.
A guy's Mini 30 on a good Youtube video (enter "Mini 30 420 yards") describes his x39 round having about 566 ft-lbs. at 420 yards. his numbers indicate that the round loses about three-fourths of its energy by then.
Maybe he loads his own or does not use Russian ammo?

It surprises me that the much faster .223 does not have more at that range.

A 122-grain 7.62x39mm round is going about 1120 fps at 400 meters, for 340 ft-lb. So you are entirely correct that the .223 does carry more velocity (1830) and energy (463 ft-lb) to 400 meters than a typical 7.62x39mm, but air resistance still bleeds off most of the energy in the first 100 yards. The .223 bullet is a little less draggy than the stubbier 122-grain 7.62x39mm bullet, but the .223 bullet is very, very light so it still sheds velocity quickly.

I suspect the Youtube guy is handloading with heavier bullets (the 7.62x39mm can handle up to 154-grain bullets or so).

To carry a lot of energy to 400 yards, you would have to step up to heavier bullets and lower drag (bullets having higher "ballistic coefficients", in ballistics jargon). That's why snipers usually use .308 Winchester and up, and why long-range shooters step up to .300 Magnum, .338 Lapua, etc. at extreme ranges.

 

[futureranger]

every one wants the best balistics for their rifle, but what a lot of people forget is a 30-30 can kill a deer just as dead as your tricked out 300 wum (up to about 150yds ha) heck so can a 22lr. if you want a 4 dollar shot rifle knock yourself out, ill stick with my 30-30 its perfectly suited for "my" needs. What im trying to say is most people want every advantage they can get when it comes to there firearms. not really a bad thing, all the expencive bullets just put cash back into the manufacturers who in return design new better preforming rounds. im just sick of city guys comming out to my woods in november with 3000 dollars worth of gear whistling bullets that will travel another 3 miles over my head cause they dont know how to hunt. ya they got the best balistics money can buy... but thats the scary part

 

[mordechaianiliewicz]

While I am against the concept of banning or restricting anything, I have noticed a similar phenomenon. The newest cartridges out there are stretching the possibilities of chemically propelled projectiles. The ballistic coefficients get higher, and the bullet construction gets better. But, the training doesn't get that much better on the whole, and where we hunt doesn't change much.

Basically, several of the short magnums out there are far better on thick skinned African game, or at 1,000 yard ranges. Truth be told, few of us need that for game.

Nevertheless, it's cool to have.