Tell me, if a 5.56x45mm XM193 or XM855 round hits a human chest cavity while traveling at over 2700 feet per second, what does the bullet do? Does it tumble and fragment inside of the chest cavity? Do other rounds do this as well or is it just the 5.56x45mm FMJ rounds?
Point being: while ALL rifle rounds will produce a temporary stretch …
Tell me, if a 5.56x45mm XM193 or XM855 round hits a human chest cavity while traveling at over 2700 feet per second, what does the bullet do? Does it tumble and fragment inside of the chest cavity? Do other rounds do this as well or is it just the 5.56x45mm FMJ rounds?
Point being: while ALL rifle rounds will produce a temporary stretch cavity from higher velocities, not all bullets tumble and fragment into smaller pieces inside of their targets that take doctors a lot longer to pull out of people than other rounds. For example, the USMC moved to the Mk318 Mod 0 cartridge in Afghanistan in the later years because this round had a better track record of tumbling and fragmenting inside of human chest cavities at longer ranges than the standard M855E1 ball ammunition that grunts typically carry. They moved to a better-fragmenting round because they understood the special lethality that 5.56 has when the velocities are maintained. We're only now ditching 5.56 for 6.8x51mm because of body armor proliferation and the need for grunts to be able to crack ceramic body armor plates with a heavier/fast bullet. They had to engineer steel into the brass casing just to get a heavy bullet like that to fire at high enough pressures to produce the velocity necessary to crack armor plates with a heavy enough bullet.
Tell me, if a 5.56x45mm XM193 or XM855 round hits a human chest cavity while traveling at over 2700 feet per second, what does the bullet do? Does it tumble and fragment inside of the chest cavity? Do other rounds do this as well or is it just the 5.56x45mm FMJ rounds?
Point being: while ALL rifle rounds will produce a temporary stretch cavity from higher velocities, not all bullets tumble and fragment into smaller pieces inside of their targets that take doctors a lot longer to pull out of people than other rounds. For example, the USMC moved to the Mk318 Mod 0 cartridge in Afghanistan in the later years because this round had a better track record of tumbling and fragmenting inside of human chest cavities at longer ranges than the standard M855E1 ball ammunition that grunts typically carry. They moved to a better-fragmenting round because they understood the special lethality that 5.56 has when the velocities are maintained. We're only now ditching 5.56 for 6.8x51mm because of body armor proliferation and the need for grunts to be able to crack ceramic body armor plates with a heavier/fast bullet. They had to engineer steel into the brass casing just to get a heavy bullet like that to fire at high enough pressures to produce the velocity necessary to crack armor plates with a heavy enough bullet.