It is purely a marketing tool for selling velocity.
Which ammunition company was Gottfried Leibniz working for when he discovered energy in the late 1600s? Which bullet was Emilie du Chatelet marketing when she did her experiments confirming the validity of Liebniz's energy theory in the early 1700s?
I never said that energy was unimportant. I said it was a meaningless number that tell us nothing useful.
It is important, meaningful and useful. It doesn't tell the whole story, by any means (no single number can), but it does provide very useful insight into certain aspects of terminal ballistics.
It's all too easy to provide just a handful of examples to show that energy is of no use.
It is all too easy to use examples to prove that one does not understand energy and how it applies to terminal ballistics (or perhaps simply rejects it without even trying to understand), however it is impossible to show that it is of no use in that field because its utility was already firmly established via repeatable experiments long before any of us were born.
Yes, let's talk about what John Taylor actually said:
I quoted what he actually said and it disagreed with your assertion of how he intended his "Practical Striking-Energy" figures to be interpreted. Why aren't we talking about that instead? Getting one quote right doesn't mean that your previous misquote/mischaracterization suddenly becomes accurate.
Simple examples show that using TKO to compare small bores to big bores is futile.
I agree with that statement 100%. However, I was responding to a claim that TKO was "never meant to compare small bores to big bores". Taylor explicitly stated that he included some small bores in his table just for that exclusive purpose.
Bullets are rated for impact velocity. Converting this to energy is not only never done but it is also not useful. What would be the point? There is none, it's irrelevant. There would be absolutely no point in rating bullets for energy levels.
Bullet ratings are quoted in terms of impact velocity for the convenience of the consumer, but the operative factor in bullet expansion/deformation is impact energy since that is the quantity that is "used up" in the process of deforming the projectile. In other words, the actual rating and design is based on impact energy but provided in terms of impact velocity for simplicity/convenience.
In my simple mind, too many are obsessed on the energy/ momentum of incoming ballistic but failed to understand how much of that energy/ momentum absorbed in the receiving body that constitutes “knock down power”.
Also, the “body” is not made up of homogenous constituents. It’s a complex mechanism with “mental determination “ extremely difficult to quantify. All these makes a simple formula, even complex mathematical models, impossible to quantify.
There's a lot of truth to this. It is a mistake to overemphasize energy or to pretend that it means more than it does--and unfortunately that is all too common. But dismissing it is just as big of a mistake. It just needs to be taken for what it is, nothing more or less. I agree 100% that trying to boil terminal ballistics in living tissue/knockdown power/stopping power down to a simple formula is not a productive activity.