kokapelli
And yet they did pretty well in the lucky gunner tests.
I think it comes down to what you think will be good for you.
The test at Shooting the Bull was done with a 2.8" barrel. Critical Defense penetrated an average of 8.4 inches in bare gel and 12.5 in the 4 layer test. I imagine that real life situations would be somewhere in between full winter dress and naked. So all in all, not too bad.
The Lucky Gunner test didn't show their bare gel test, but the 4-layer test produced an average of 13.2 inches from a 3.25 inch barrel. If the values were proportional though, a bare gel average would have been somewhere around 9 inches. I'm not sure that they would be exactly proportional, but it sounds about right.
The Hornady website says that it has conducted extensive tests with a 4 inch test barrel and gotten an average of 10.25 inches in bare gel. There was no 4-layer test values. If they were proportional to the Shooting the Bull test, this would give a 15-16 inch penetration through denim. Again, I'm not too sure about how mathematically proportional the two tests are, but all of the videos I've seen show penetrations that are close to these numbers for 3.5+ inch barrels.
So it would appear that (
especially when using .380 ACP) barrel length plays a pretty significant role. When looking at the Ballistics By The Inch website, I noticed that in the real world weapons section, there was sometimes up to a 200 fps difference on the same round when comparing between 2.5 inch barrels and 3.66 inch barrels.
That being said, and after reading through all of the comments here, that there probably isn't a perfect .380 acp. What may be good for one gun may be not so good in another. There are so many factors to consider like muzzle velocity, how much a round expands, and whether the round expands too quickly, too late, not at all, etc...
I started out this thread looking for the latest and greatest; the best possible .380 round. Now I'm more confused than before. I think that I may just stick with what I've got on hand. I have 3 or 4 boxes of Critical Defense on hand, and although it may or may not be the best, I think I'll just use it and stop worrying.