The real problem is that you have some sort of mental block about kinetic energy. I honestly think that you believe someone invented it, and the equations that deal with it, just to screw with people who are trying to understand terminal ballistics--in order to make things confusing and misleading. It's simply not true, and until you get past that issue you're not going to make any progress in the direction of understanding the basics of projectile physics.
Kinetic energy was one of the fisrt things I understood about ballistics, and for a long time when I was younger, I placed too much importance on it.
As we all know, there is a lot more to terminal ballistics than energy. And if you were to dig through my posts deep enough, you'll find that I have emphasized before that KE is a good measure of the
ability to do work. I've said more than once and almost verbatim that a higher KE allows a bullet to be either driven deeper, expanded wider or a combination of the two.
This concept does not elude me.
However, back to the 100 ft/lbs in .02 ft:
Quoted from the site
you linked for the equations:
Even though the application of conservation of energy to a falling object allows us to predict its impact velocity and kinetic energy, we cannot predict its impact force without knowing how far it travels after impact.
Just as I said, we cannot know the force if we don't know the time (or velocity). We have distance and KE, but we need time (or velocity from which to calculate time) since force is a product of time, distance and mass or, more simply, acceleration (or deceleration) and mass.
That site also does not show us how to calculate the force applied by an energy exerting object that travels a certain distance but does not stop in that distance. I'll be content if you can solve for it as I mentioned earlier, or if you can point me to somewhere where I can, because I've been looking and had no success in coming up with any formula other than the one I derived using another for conservation of energy.
Until then, I maintain that using the standard force=time/distance*mass tells us that a bullet that deposits that energy in less time will produce greater force. Hence the 9mm round that depostis 100 ft/lbs over .02 ft in 17 microseconds exerts greater force on the target than the .45 ACP that deposits the same 100 ft/lbs in 26 Microseconds.
Noteworthy is that the difference in force between the 9mm and .45 loads is proportionate to the difference in momentum (after the energy loss).
I'm all ears for whoever can explain how something else mitigates the difference in force I came up with when the energy transfer occurs in the same distance over different times. I'm not being a smart@$$; I really would like to know if there's something I didn't factor in that will show both of those loads to produce 5,000 pounds of force, regardless of their different velocities and resulting different amount of time spent in the target delivering the energy.
It did strike me as quite a coincidence that the velocity loss of each was so close to shed 100 ft/lbs, though I didn't plan it that way; I just picked two common, standard loads.
No and no. No, it's not "Courtney's theory". No, it's not flawed.
So creating examples with inelastic collisions is only flawed if I do it?