redcon1
member
I think I'm looking more at terminal ballistics characteristics as a function of stability, under stability and over stability. I have shot m855 out of a 7 /1/2 " barrel. Pretty much every bullet put a perfect keyhole in the target. Even though the twist was sufficient to stabilize a SS109, the barrel was so short that there wasn't enough velocity to stabilize the bullet and they all tumbled. At the time I thought to myself, that sucks, I should shoot lighter bullets out of this pistol AR15 so the rounds will be more stable but as I thought about it more, I suspected that that tumbling bullet would be devastating terminally and would guarantee irregular wound channels and greatly increase the likelihood of fragmentation along the cannelure. A bullet entering the chest could end up coming out the abdomen or the neck and thus, would be more likely to strike vital organs and structures as it passed through. It would be more likely to break at the cannelure too and would likely create at least 2 wound channels. So with that in mind, I don't know that you would want your M855 to be overly stable. Understabilized would, IMO, be more lethal but it would certainly come at a loss of accuracy.Do not confuse a bullets inherent stability with its accuracy.
Stability is a measure of the behavior of the long axis of the bullet relative to the path of flight.
Accuracy is how well one path of flight matches the previous, and the next.
I once recovered an M80 ball round that had accidentally been discharged in a house (from an FN-FAL that I subsequently acquired). It went through a door, multiple walls, a bathroom vanity, both sides of a bathtub and through 20-30 classic rock albums. What was interesting was that when the bullet hit the bath tub, it broke into three separate projectiles and each of those projectiles still carried enough energy to go through the other side of the bathtub, the bathroom wall and into a closet where the albums were all lined up. The three fragments were interestingly, all located in the albums and they were not small fragments. That's what you want a military projectile to do. I shoot targets however so I want my bullets to be optimally stable, accurate and consistent from one shot to the next. I don't care what they do terminally. They only have to punch a hole through a piece of paper.
Last edited: