sgt_zim
AH legend
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- Mar 26, 2017
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About that energy dumping thing...Not many will want to hear it, if you loaded him up some Berger bullet. It would be a game changer in the performance of deer. The mono bullet will zip through a deer. The Berger may not even exit dumping all the energy in to the deer.
Mono bullets are good for heavy animals that can make the bullet expand. For lighter game cup and core bullets will perform better from my experience.
Every single bullet for every single cartridge made has a limit at which the bullet will lack sufficient energy to create 2 holes in the critter.
A 577 NE, fired from 50 yards at a cape buffalo, will almost always create an exit wound, no matter the shot angle. From 200 or 300 yards, it probably would not create an exit wound, especially on a quartering-to shot, and probably not broadside, either. Unquestionably, with the bullet fired from 50 yards the tissue damage will be more extensive than the one fired from 200 or 300 yards.
There are so many variables (MV, shot distance, shot angle, size/thickness of the target, shot placement, etc.) involved in determining penetration depth that it can't be predicted to any degree of accuracy, and ultimately, there is only one of those variables 100% under your control at all times: the bullet itself.
At high impact velocities, bullets with thin jackets and non-bonded cores tend to fragment, and sometimes quite badly. Hence, the genesis of the Nosler Partition bullet after John Nosler almost had a moose hunt go horribly badly in 1946. If you don't know the story, he came up on a mud-caked bull moose at about 50 yards, and ended up shooting it 7 or 8 times with his 300 H&H mag. After he finally put it down and started dressing it, he discovered most of those bullets had shattered on impact, and had only created nasty flesh wounds. If he'd been shooting from 200 yards instead of 50, he likely wouldn't have had that issue.
The 7mm Rem Mag was almost a failure as a hunting platform. At the time, the most common bullet for it was Remington's Core Lokt bullet. The number of bullet failures was extraordinary, so bad that a lot of people ended up thinking it was just a crap cartridge all the way around. Even as recently as the 1960s and 1970s, terminal performance was a very poorly understood subject (not that it's leaps and bounds better today, but it is better). The real issue was simply that those Core Lokts just weren't holding up at close shooting distances where impact velocities were still closer to 3000 fps than they were to 2500 fps.
Penetration is more a function of momentum than KE. To that end, a 150 gr bullet that fragments into 10 equal sized pieces (doesn't happen that uniformly, of course) means you have 10 different 15 gr projectiles trying to penetrate. They will not penetrate to the same depth as a bullet that retained 90% or more of its mass.
I'm glad you're having success with the Bergers, but for my money, Remington Core Lokt, Hornady Interlock/Interbond, and Speer Grand Slam are more reliable cup-and-core penetrators when fired at non-magnum velocities.