alsaqr said:
I love the way the "ballistics experts" tout their ballistic gelatin approach to wound ballistics. The human body is not made of ballistic gelatin. Neither is it made of red clay or wet newspapers.
Ballistics gelatin is intentionally not designed to mimic the human body. This is why it doesn't have bones, organs, different densities, etc.
The problem with your suggested method is that it has too many variables to control in a scientific setting. For example, I watched a video of a shoat shot with a .50 BMG from about 150 yds. The <100lb pig proceeded to run about 80 yards before pitching over. It had been shot too far back. Now if I compare that to a video of a one-shot stop of a hog with .223, I could easily reach a bunch of questionable conclusions.
The problems get even worse since a bone may deflect a round into a vital organ here and away from a vital organ there. You've got no reliable way to compare two bullets because too many other things affect terminal performance in real life, most notably, shot placement.
The whole purpose of ballistics gel is to be able to compare rounds without all those variables cluttering up the data. This is why ballistics gel is calibrated, velocities noted, etc. It is also why scientists use ballistics gel rather than clay or wet newspaper; because it can be consistently reproduced by different scientists so that results can be compared.
In the meantime, scientists have noticed a strong correlation between ammunition that performs a certain way in ballistics gel and actual shootings of mammals. They know that a round that is capable of doing X in ballistics gel, also tends to do real well in actual shootings.
I know how the M193 round performs on hogs at moderate ranges because I have killed big bunches of hogs with that round. It is my opinion that the M193 round will perform just as well on humans when fired from a 20" or longer barrel at ranges to 150 yards.
Let me ask a few questions to give an idea of some of the variables that might explain why your experience is different from somebody else's on this subject:
1. You say M193; but M193 is not available to the civilian market. What specific bullet/cartridge are you using? You may be buying Prvi Partisan "M193" while someone else is buying Federal XM193 and there could be subtle differences in how those rounds are jacketed affecting their performance.
2. How many different rifles have you used in hunting hogs? Is the effect uniform across every rifle? There is a phenomenon called "fleet yaw." This basically means that two identical M4 rifles firing the same ammunition from the same lot can show totally different performance with regards to yaw/fragmentation (one of the things scientists discovered in the last ten years through the use of ballistics gelatin).
I'm not discounting your experience. I am a big fan of seeing how stuff works with my own eyes myself; but I am pointing out that there are a lot of reasons why people might not have the same experience you have and that without ballistics gelatin research, we wouldn't even be aware of the existence of many of these reasons, let alone understand how they might affect your practical use.