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To be fair, the relationship between energy and velocity is quadratic. That is like eighth grade math, man. And obviously it should not matter because they have surely written down the exact provenance of any bullet they fired down to the lot number, right?
Also, a study with group sample sizes of N=1 and N=2 surely is even an embarrassment among the medical community? And that is before they arbitrarily (but non-randomly!) grouped the tests into the 150mm and 250mm thickness categories.
Also, this is physics. Only a complete idiot would make a bunch of measurements of the time objects need to fall to the ground and their height from which they were dropped, fit a linear regression curve through them, declare victory (significant!) and publish their coefficient of regression with a p value. Instead, what any high school kid in physics class would be expected to do is to find the value of gravitational acceleration which best explains their data. From a junior physics student, I would furthermore expect an exhaustive error analysis.
I am in particle physics. Obviously there are tools which can well describe the interactions of particles of all sorts with matter, be it a proton flying through your detector or a photon in the interstellar medium. The same is very likely true for other niche interests, like how buildings behave in earthquakes -- 99% of the population might not care (beforehand, at least), but the few people who do will likely make a decent job to model reality.
I do not see why small arms should be any different. To be honest, it does not seem all that difficult. Soft tissue is mostly water, so I would have assumed you could learn a lot about bullet penetration simply from buying the cheapest vegan hydrogel and firing bullets into it. Furthermore, it kinda seems a thing people would care about, given that militaries all over the world are still operating rifles. The idea that they would care about the cavitation effects of a nautical propeller but not about the interaction between humans and bullets seems absurd.
Even if water is too simple a model, I assume that most of the drag on a bullet does not come from the human soul. A semi-empirical model of wound ballistics based on animal studies seems reachable. You don't even have to use live animals for once!
That musket ball thing is just the icing on the cake. I am very much not a gun nut, but I would rather have a 5.56mm NATO go through my arm than a musket ball. From a humanitarian perspective, the redeeming qualities of the musket were that it was inaccurate, had a limited reach and took a long time to reload compared to latter battlefield horrors, but I imagine getting hit by one was gruesome.
As a side note, while I am very much not a domain expert, measuring the pressure exerted by a bullet seems particularly painful. Just measure the loss in velocity (time of flight measurements at those speeds seem easy, the offset of penetration between two rotating paper disks will do if you don't want to buy a Doppler radar or fancy light barriers). From the force which acted on the bullet in the gel you can use computer models to estimate what the pressure at the tip of the bullet actually was, but in the end you will want to use computer models to investigate hydrostatic shock in any case.
From your description, this smells like cargo-cult science, but I feel that this is not a field which has any excuse to be cargo-cult science.
Heh. Yeah, there's a lot of signs that this was a real rat's nest under the hood. I didn't want to get even more nitpicky, but it's somewhat entertaining to see some firearms break down the manufacturer and barrel length, and then ".32 Caliber Handgun" on the next line. Forget the question of barrel length. Which cartridge, specifically? And then you think like an actual gunny and get really curious about loadings, manufacturer, SAAMI rated or +P, and you start to realize exactly how much could be hiding in the experimental details.
That said, I'm hoping that the outlier fragmentation 5.56 reflects some weird and el cheapo ammo from an entirely different manufacturer. Because it looks like one of the first trials they did, and a 20% squib is very interesting, if it came from the same pack as everything else.
It's a little harder and less well-researched than you'd expect. The ballistic gel side is one of the more settled questions: ordnance gel was very much a WWI-era thing, admittedly still a lot later than you'd expect for something that's basically just animal protein, and it wasn't really used outside of the military or NATO contexts until the 1990s. The new gel here is easier to keep, nicer to work with, and -- important for camera work -- much clearer, but it's new enough that it's worth being sure your data is good. What's frustrating is they knew they needed that extra validity, but went full streetlight effect. Which is a bizarre discontinuity of effort when talking about tons of pig flesh!
Hydrostatic shock as a theory dates back to the Vietnam era if not earlier, but at least in public scientific work, the earliest version of the readily-tested scenario of 'bone-in-jello' was in the 2010s. There's been a bunch of attempts to test it in animals, but they've been very ad-hoc and focused on energy levels and round sizes where... well, you don't worry about hydrostatic shock being what kills you.
That's actually one of the matters of dispute. An actual musket would have had similar kinetic energy and carved a much wider wound channel as the 5.56 NATO, which is definitely gruesome, and there's very few human organs that like having a three-quarter-inch (or inch: soft lead deforms) hole drilled through them. Even a lower-round, 'small' flintlock rifle reproduction from that era can be pretty unpleasant to see on a clean hit. But the cavitation effects are much lower and more evenly distributed on an imperfect shot. The 5.56 carves a smaller wound channel (even if it tumbles!), but in ballistic gel you get these massive and really traumatic-looking temporary distortions, caused by the rate of energy release.
The gunnie community is split, and I'll admit that I don't know what to trust on it.
Historical efforts have focused on pure simulation models to measure pressure waves, but they're very assumption-heavy for lower-energy rounds, because even minor deformation and changes to the drag coefficient give drastically different outputs. Validating the models would genuinely help at least get an idea of what scale of event is going on.
This study just can't do it.
That's fair, and if anything the optimistic case.
To be fair to most of the study's authors, it's a plausible one: these people are almost all medical side, the issues are physics (or electrical engineering) or statistics problems that aren't what these people focus on in their day-to-day life. The sensor distance problem and filter problem feels obvious if you've every worried about decoupling capacitors, but I'd guess most people don't think like that. That's a bit of an indictment of academia -- medical people should be the last group to just order random digikey sensors and not think very hard about experimental design, and medical professors should have easy access to technical experts who know what they don't -- but it's... an unfortunately common one.
... but the pessimistic case is that the musket thing isn't a one-off. There's a lot of decisions here that push toward a rewarding narrative, and it'd be easy for an academic to push a study to prove a point, rather than find the truth. At least one of them did, whether by intent or by extreme negligence.
Sounds like somebody needs to shoot Grosskreutz's other arm with a musket! (ah... for science, in minecraft -- don't actually shoot this guy again please!)
The Kenosha incident did convince me that close-range 223 makes very nasty wounds though -- there is a significant muzzleloader hunting community one could draw from here -- unfortunately that's not one of my personal hobbies so IDK, but I'd be kind of surprised if a .75 ball didn't mostly just pencil even at close range? (a really big pencil mind you; an inch sounds about right)
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It is entirely reasonable to prioritize propeller cavitation research over rifle ballistics. Everyone knows how rifles work. You point them at the enemy, pull the trigger, and then they die. If your nation’s ballistic missile submarines don’t have anti-cavitation propellers, then you don’t have a resilient second-strike retaliatory force to maintain strategic deterrence.
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