Got a Real-World Weapon, Armor or Tactics Question? Mk. XXV

[Galloglaich]

Alan Williams is in the Nova video, explaining that nothing would have protected against a musketeer at close range.

https://youtu.be/YNhh1yDpOEk?t=39m32s

My guess is that the show was instead trying to simulate a caliver, which was far more common than the musket on 1580s battlefields anyways, but didn't want to spend time going into detail about elizabethan terminology and explaining that just because something looks like a musket doesn't mean it actually was a musket.

You are only "guessing" that because it doesn't fit your expectations. You want to bend the data to fit your expectations, but it works a lot better in the long run if you do it the other way around. I think the people involved knew the difference.

Williams reaches similar conclusions in The Knight and the Blast Furnace. Firearms improved over time and over the course of the 15th and 16th century armorers responded by making armor either harder or thicker. He concludes that in the late 16th century, a bullet striking a 3mm plate made of **** steel (the highest quality) at 45 degrees would require around 3000 joules to penetrate. Full-sized muskets however were capable of achieving much more energy than that.

Rrrg, as usual you are confused here and trying to change the parameters of what I actually said so as to win an argument.

If you actually read, as opposed to skimmed through Knight and the Blast furnace, you would know that per Williams tables based on the tests they did, there was plenty of armor around more than capable of resisting all firearms in the medieval period.

3000 joules, incidentally, is about the energy of a typical 16th Century musket, at the muzzle, which is to say, at even the closest band of normal firing range they would have a hard time penetrating 3mm-4mm of **** steel, although it doesn't take that much with iron *(i.e. effectively, armor-piercing) ammunition.

From Chapter 9 of Williams' book, p. 942 has a table stating that a 1.9mm wrought iron plate requires 900J from a steel (or cast iron) ball or 1500J from a lead ball to defeat it. Good quality steel armor can resist about double this energy. On p. 948 Williams reckons that an average quality 4mm cuirassier's breastplate would need 2000J to defeat it.

There were very few, if any Late Medieval firearms which could generate 2,000J

Per Williams:

From p. 945
a Hussite 15th C handgun with serpentine powder produces 500-1000J at the muzzle.

early 16th C arquebus with serpentine powder produces 1300J at the muzzle
the same weapon with corned powder produces 1750J
later 16th C musket with serpentine powder produces 2300J
the same weapon with corned powder produces 3000 J

Which is why we can see the result from the NOVA video is not unexpected. The way they made the armor in the NOVA video, incidentally, was the way armor was made in Augsburg in 1470 for ordinary soldiers at a cost well within the range affordable by regular artisans or wealthy peasants.

I would also go so far as to say that top quality late medieval armor of **** (tempered medium carbon steel) would probably stop a modern handgun like a .357, assuming using regular lead or copper jacketed lead ammunition.

What no armor could stop, however, and what really made armor start to decline (aside from the Socio-Economic reasons I have alluded to) is cannon. No armor can stop a cannon ball, therefore armor could no longer really offer the kind of relative invulnerability that it once did on the battlefield. This is one of the reasons why you see the higher nobility gradually removing themselves from the front line in the Early Modern period.

Muskets, which appear (at first in small numbers) in the Early Modern period, were specifically designed, at least originally, to be armor-piercing weapons, in fact they are analogous to earlier and more cumbersome "wall guns" and "trestle guns" and so on used in the medieval period for example by the Czechs and Germans (and Swiss and Italians and Flemish and others) but the best armor still seems to have protected reasonably well against them. Later muskets were not nearly as powerful.

Also we are talking here about the thickest parts of the armor on the front of the helmet or cuirass. Reiter cavalry in the 17th Century were trained to shoot the thighs or faces, or the side of the horse armor of their opponents, ideally at 'almost touching' range.



By the late 16th Century the original Late Medieval armor industries in Augsburg, Nuremberg, Brescia and Milan had dramatically shrunk, if not collapsed, and were no longer making armor for middle class consumption. Many of the armorer families had moved to places like Innsbruck or Greenwich to work in Royal foundries to make armor for the elites. So that bullet proof armor which was affordable for a master mason or an affluent farmer in 1470 was pretty much only made for Dukes or Kings in the 17th Century.

The typical armor being made in the 17th Century was made out of effectively wrought iron, and could be as much as 8mm thick (per Williams). Not because that worked better, because the industry to make tempered steel armor on any kind of large scale no longer existed. Per Alan Williams (p. 948 "Increasing the thickness from 2 to 3.1mm will double the resistance, and have a similar effect to the use of hardened steel at a fraction of the cost.") But of course it means the soldier has to carry around much more weight. This seemed to be directly related to some extent to the old Masters dying out - Anton Peffenhauser was one of the last of the old Augsburg Masters working in Greenwich, his death in 1603 coincides pretty well to the last known attempt at heat treated armor to come out of that facility in 1612.



Finally, I would like to make a general suggestion on research. I know there is a certain appeal to Early Modern military manuals- I like to read them too and many of them are readily accessible and relatively easy to understand from a modern point of view - but I think if you want to understand the middle ages at all, you would do better to read stuff from the middle ages. And if you want to understand what happened in battles, you are better off reading chronicles, letters and personal accounts from people directly involved than manuals of theory in general (particularly ones from 200 years after the fact).

Modern archeological / scientific / empirical analysis like that of Mr. Williams is also very helpful of course as a way to verify the earlier sources.

It's a lot harder to make sense of medieval sources, both because far fewer of them are transcribed let alone translated into easily accessible modern languages, but also because their world is so very different from ours. Much different than the Early Modern period is and also in many respects, much different than the Roman or Ancient Greek. Their language is often very easy to read, it's if anything easier to follow (translations of) Machiavelli or Piccolomini or Jan Dlugosz than it is to follow John Smythe, at least for me. It's just that the assumptions they make, the world they refer to and come from, it's wildly complex and in a word, alien to our world. But it's also fascinating and rewarding, not least of which it's not just armor that they did well in that era - so much of art, architecture, chemistry and a million other things in our world today come out of that strange universe of the Late Medieval which we sometimes (I think misleadingly, in many cases) call the Renaissance.

But if you are interested in this stuff, it's worth it to make the effort. More and more medieval sources are becoming available and after you have read a few of them, the patterns start to make sense. I think you'll find so do many things about that period that you find frustrating now because they don't fit into the Early Modern patterns.

G

[Galloglaich]

In other words TL : DR , take the plunge, walk through the looking glass - it's incredibly rewarding and if you can figure out rules to an RPG or 'canon' for some complicated fantasy / sci fi genre book series, you can (eventually) figure out medieval sources.

But leave your expectations behind, everything we "know" about the Middle Ages is wrong. And as a wise friend of mine once reminded me, the past is a foreign country, and we must try not to offend the locals.

G

[Lvl 2 Expert]

the past is a foreign country

With an outdated military and huge oil reserves.

[Galloglaich]

With an outdated military and huge oil reserves.

Hahahahaha yeah but what happens when they get a hold of a few of our machineguns and tanks?

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Hahahahaha yeah but what happens when they get a hold of a few of our machineguns and tanks?

Or worse, our genealogical records. "Sarah Connor?"

[rrgg]

Hi Galloglaich,

I assure you that I'm not confused, I haven't been moving goalposts to win an argument, I haven't been over-relying on primary sources or modern testing, and I'm not the one who posted a youtube video about a suit of armor made at Greenwich, England in 1588 for Lord Compton (**** quality, according to Alan Williams), which features two overlapping breastplates designed specifically to improve protection against firearms rather than to increase flexibility, and then began implying that this test provides rock-solid proof for your assumptions about armor in the 15th century.

To be absolutely clear, I do not think you are dumb. I think you are an extremely reasonable and well-informed individual who I have learned a lot from over the years, which is why I've kept coming back to try to better explain some of my main points rather than giving up to do something else because I hate typing and it's just a stupid internet argument.

So, will you please follow your own advice and take a moment to put aside your own preconceptions as best you can while you hear me out? I'm putting aside all the other stuff and I just want to say something about early modern guns and armor in the for now.

There's a lot we don't know about medieval armour, but at the very least we have some surviving examples to study and historians like Alan Williams have managed to use metallurgical analysis to teach us a ton about how many of these armors were made and how well they may have protected against various sorts of attacks.

However we still have no way whatsoever to go back in time and measure how fast a particular bullet was traveling during this period. The first time people were able to accurately measure and record the instantaneous muzzle velocity of a projectile was in the mid 18th century with Benjamin Robbins' invention of the ballistic pendulum. In New Principles of Gunnery he mentions testing the velocity of a .75 caliber musket loaded with "about half" the ball's weight of powder. At 25 feet from the muzzle he was able to calculate a velocity of 1700 fps. Even with the 32 g bullet from the Brown Bess that would translate into about 4,300 Joules of KE, or enough to mince almost everything from Williams' tables (assuming that a soldier's powder wasn't somewhat damp at the time and he didn't spill any of it while loading). Later experimentation with the pendulum at England's Royal Powder Mills and elsewhere were able to come up with new powder that was twice as powerful by the end of the century and the size of the cartridges given to musketeers were reduced accordingly. American Experiments involving different powders and quantities during the 19th century continued to aim for an average velocity of 1500 fps with smoothbore muskets, and suggest that that the powders used could sometimes even outperform modern black powders. Tests involving a "common rifle" firing a round ball wrapped in a tight-fitting greased patch showed muzzle velocities of around 2000 fps.

So the question is where does this leave earlier powder? As you know it's dangerous to assume a linear pattern of incremental improvement. So assumptions like the one from that NOVA documentary where they claim the bullet would be fired at around "1000 feet per second" should probably be taken as fairly conservative estimates. Especially when 16th century small arms tended to have a fairly long barrel relative to their caliber and use a much higher powder:lead ratio than many later guns. Again we only have a really vague idea of exactly what taste an early gunner was looking for when he touched various ingredients to his tongue to test the quality, how he determined whether the powder corns had the right texture or if they needed to be beaten more, which woods made the best charcoal and whether they should be cooked in containers of iron or clay, how well he understood the slight variations which made a powder ideal for a musket vs carbine vs a pistol, etc. We also don't know how good a particular soldier was at keeping his powder dry and well stored, how well he seated the bullet and the powder with his ramrod, or where exactly he drew the line between raw power, recoil, and personal safety when measuring his charges.

This isn't nit-picky rivet-counting if it could potentially mean the difference between the bullet dropping to the ground after 3 feet or reaching 2000 fps when it reaches the end of the barrel. Tests like the one in this Nova documentary which show just how difficult piercing 16th century armors could be, when compared the many contemporary voices who are so pessimistic about the ability of armor to withstand gunfire, at times even from arquebuses and pistols, claim that newer armors are better at resisting firearms than those from just decades earlier, and that firearms could penetrate far better than any older weapons such as longbows, crossbows, maces, or lances (though Roger Williams claimed that a couched lance was about on par with with a pistol as long as the lancers "know how to breake" well). Sure, it might just be that every single one of these authors was wrong and had no idea what they were talking about, but all things considered I think it much better supports the conclusion that early firearms were often much more powerful than typically assumed.

-

As a quick aside about the size of muskets,

The usual number I hear quoted is that the 16th century "Spanish" musket fired a bullet weighing about 2 ounces, or 8 bore. Although it might be that many muskets made outside of spain by the end of the century had already dropped to between 8-12 bore at the end of the century. Early in the Italian wars Maximilian apparently had a number of arquebus du crocs bored to fire 6 bullets in a pound of lead and each light enough to be carried by a very strong man.

In the early 1600s the spanish had switched to a musket which fit an 8 bore bullet but fired a 10 bore bullet rolling in. While the dutch and many other nations eventually adopted a standard musket of 10 bore, with a 12-bore rolling in. When they eventually became standard the british brown bess used a barrel of 11-bore, 14 rolling in, while the french fusil was eventually standardized at about 14-bore, about 17 or 18 rolling in.

So while they do become smaller and lighter over time, the actual caliber still remains a bit larger than most of the estimates I've found for 16th century arquebuses and calivers, which tend to range anywhere from 1 oz to less than .5 oz for the bullet.

[Carl]

Wait, 3kJ? NATO 5.56mm only gets 1.8kJ and the NATO 7.62mm used in sniper rifles would just about penetrate comfortably (3.3-3.5 kJ).

Surface area and material composition.

A lead musket ball is >50 cal size and deforms very easily because its lead.

As such it has to penetrate a larger area whilst wasting more energy on the bullet, (i.e. the musket ball), undergoing rapid disintegration prior to penetration.

[Vinyadan]

When I tried calculating it in the past, a "perfect" charge by a knight would inflict 9 kJ on whoever was at the end of the lance. Does it double when jousting?

I tried calculating it again now, assuming 800 kg total for the horse + knight, at 20 km/h, I get 12 kJ. If there really were warhorses around 950 kg, + 80 kg of naked knight, + let's say 60 kg of equipment, I get 1090 kg total, and something like 16 kJ.

Are these results likely? Or am I messing up? Of course, not all of this energy would be transmitted to the target, and knight+horse aren't a single part, so that has to count for something. Someone noticed that Polish lancers would lather adopt hollow lances, which makes them more robust and allows to transmit more energy before they snap.

Jousting must really have been a great show, however.

[Max_Killjoy]

Surface area and material composition.

A lead musket ball is >50 cal size and deforms very easily because its lead.

As such it has to penetrate a larger area whilst wasting more energy on the bullet, (i.e. the musket ball), undergoing rapid disintegration prior to penetration.

Indeed.

There's so much more to penetration and damage inflicted than simply the energy involved.

[rrgg]

When I tried calculating it in the past, a "perfect" charge by a knight would inflict 9 kJ on whoever was at the end of the lance. Does it double when jousting?

I tried calculating it again now, assuming 800 kg total for the horse + knight, at 20 km/h, I get 12 kJ. If there really were warhorses around 950 kg, + 80 kg of naked knight, + let's say 60 kg of equipment, I get 1090 kg total, and something like 16 kJ.

Are these results likely? Or am I messing up? Of course, not all of this energy would be transmitted to the target, and knight+horse aren't a single part, so that has to count for something. Someone noticed that Polish lancers would lather adopt hollow lances, which makes them more robust and allows to transmit more energy before they snap.

Jousting must really have been a great show, however.

Tobias Capwell did some experiments on this recently and came up with the equivalent of 90-200 Joules without an arret. with the arret 200 J was regularly attained all the way up to 250 J, limited by the lance breaking. He suspected that with a stronger lance it would be possible to reach 300 J.


https://www.academia.edu/33789994/AN..._COUCHED_LANCE

Indeed.

There's so much more to penetration and damage inflicted than simply the energy involved.

That's an extremely good point. Even when it comes to comparing round bullets energy is a very rough approximation. A larger, heavier ball is going to have more energy and more momentum, but it needs to punch a much larger hole to penetrate. This is another one of the problems with some of the tables in Williams' book. The one on page 928 which gets posted to internet forums a lot in particular had its numbers extrapolated from experiments against a 2mm mild steel plate, so it didn't actually involve shooting at 3mm or 4 mm of armor and it relies on assuming that bullets of different calibers behave similarly with the same amount of energy.

https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.ph...ew/17669/22312

Here's the English summary of Peter Krenn's tests, which Williams also relied on heavily for his information. It's still not clearly explained how they came up with their various charges, but if you go through and calcuate the various kinetic energies at both 30m and 100m you can find quite a few places where the energy and penetration of mild steel don't match up with Williams' table. You can even find places where the penetration of mild steel doesn't match up with the penetration of wood for the same energy.

[rrgg]

To be honest, I haven't actually been reading that much about the middle ages lately. I've mostly been sticking to early modern with an emphasis on elizabethan england for the most part. And quite frankly it is weird, and not that well understood if you look at it with a lot of modern or medieval expectations. If anyone's interested in some reading I'd highly recommend Mark Fissel's English Warfare 1511-1642 which gets into a lot of the utter jackassery english knights and officers were still getting up to on the continent.

Sir Philip Sidney was far from the only nobleman to put himself in danger without putting on his armor. Sir Edward Norris during the bungled invasion of spain in 1589 was nearly killed by a sword cut to the head when he joined a cavalry charge into a massive spanish encampment without his helmet, he was then saved by the intervention of his brother John, the general, who it turns out hadn't put on any armor at all but nevertheless jumped into the fray. You also have everything from officers and gentlemen demanding that they be given the honor of being the first over the breach in the face of musket fire, artillery and grenades, to challenging each other to a fencing match on top of the trenches with hundreds of catholic soldiers taking pot shots at them. All this in spite of repeated letters from Elizabeth demanding that they knock it off.

[Carl]

That's an extremely good point. Even when it comes to comparing round bullets energy is a very rough approximation. A larger, heavier ball is going to have more energy and more momentum, but it needs to punch a much larger hole to penetrate. This is another one of the problems with some of the tables in Williams' book. The one on page 928 which gets posted to internet forums a lot in particular had its numbers extrapolated from experiments against a 2mm mild steel plate, so it didn't actually involve shooting at 3mm or 4 mm of armor and it relies on assuming that bullets of different calibers behave similarly with the same amount of energy.

https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.ph...ew/17669/22312

Here's the English summary of Peter Krenn's tests, which Williams also relied on heavily for his information. It's still not clearly explained how they came up with their various charges, but if you go through and calculate the various kinetic energies at both 30m and 100m you can find quite a few places where the energy and penetration of mild steel don't match up with Williams' table. You can even find places where the penetration of mild steel doesn't match up with the penetration of wood for the same energy.

Indeed its a very complex subject, in a system where everything deforms equally regardless of musket ball dimensions you can roughly say the penetration energy required is proportional to the average mass behind any ne section of the maximum contact area, the problem of course is that this isn't true in full because differing sizes will produce differing deformation characteristics. In simple terms a small musket ball will deform less before disintegrating completely, but will take less energy to cause complete disintegration. In addition a smaller musket ball is likely to each the point of complete disintegration faster in timescale terms. This makes calculating penetration purely from energy a very inexact science.

[jojo]

Speaking, anecdotally, the ability or inability of a bullet to penetrate armor doesn't have a direct relationship to it's lethality.

This is coming from my experience as a combat medic and first responder.

[khadgar567]

Speaking, anecdotally, the ability or inability of a bullet to penetrate armor doesn't have a direct relationship to it's lethality.

This is coming from my experience as a combat medic and first responder.

since we have a expert can you explain please mate? how common lead bullet and regular 9mm bullet effects the the legality.

[Deepbluediver]

since we have a expert can you explain please mate? how common lead bullet and regular 9mm bullet effects the the legality.

I'm not an expert but I'm guessing that the ideal bullet for penetrating armor is hard and fast, while the bullets that cause the most damage to human tissue are slow and soft, so they mushroom or fragment inside the body. There's probably some sort of correlation between armor-penetration and killing-power, though maybe not as strong as most people expect.

[Brother Oni]

since we have a expert can you explain please mate? how common lead bullet and regular 9mm bullet effects the the legality.

As I understand it, the traits for good armour penetration capabilities are the opposite for what you want for lethality.

For good armour penetration, you want a hard bullet with a small cross section that retains its shape when it hit something hard.
For lethality, you want a large round which disperses as much of its energy as quickly as possible when it hits the target, preferably also fragmenting to maximise the hole made and the damage to internal organs and structures.

People are very soft when compared to steel, so something that retains its shape through armour plate tends to overpenetrate squishy people, leaving small wound tracts with less damage than expected. This was a reported issue during the recent Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts where hits from NATO 5.56 rounds were not incapacitating enemy combatants quickly enough.
Steel is very hard compared to people, so a soft bullet will just impact on or slide off the surface, expending all its energy and fail to penetrate through to injure the person underneath.

There are some subtleties involved here with modern materials (eg kevlar is a soft armour and uses that to absorb all the energy from an incoming round) and technologies (eg HESH shells use the shockwave propagated through the armour plate to cause spalling on the other side to kill the crew or damage internal components), but by and large, this generalisation is true.

Ideally, you want to hit that sweet spot where a round will penetrate but slow down enough to cause maximum damage to the target - this is why exit wounds are generally much larger than the entry wound. The issue is that what works for a certain thickness of armour at one distance and angle, may not work for a different distance/angle or for thicker armour at the same distance and angle.

[jojo]

since we have a expert can you explain please mate? how common lead bullet and regular 9mm bullet effects the the legality.

Sure, I'll certainly do my best. Clinical/technical terms greatly aid with understanding so I'll identify the relevant ones as I employ them.

Material composition of the projectile (bullet) is a relatively accurate predictive factor for the types of trauma (injury) it will cause to a target. A lead projectile is very soft, as a result of this it will deform more easily. This in turn means that, even at high velocities, it can't be expected to penetrate armor well but that it can be expected to cause greater amounts of soft tissue damage (bigger entry wounds) without "over-penetrating" (no exit wound.)

Most modern bullets are "jacketed" in one way or another, which allows the core - usually lead - to maintain it's structural integrity and allow it to transfer more energy deeper into the body.

Some projectiles, like "hollow-points" are designed to deform more greatly on impact.

All of these are going to cause greater trauma to a human body than they will to any sort of rigid armor (plate for instance.)

Projectiles which are designed to penetrate armor on the other hand generally can be expected to cause significantly less soft tissue damage (smaller entry and exit wounds.) @Deepbluediver sums this up adequately:

I'm not an expert but I'm guessing that the ideal bullet for penetrating armor is hard and fast, while the bullets that cause the most damage to human tissue are slow and soft, so they mushroom or fragment inside the body. There's probably some sort of correlation between armor-penetration and killing-power, though maybe not as strong as most people expect.

In addition to providing a serviceable summary @Deepbluediver provides a nice segue into the effects of velocity. Higher velocity projectiles of any material composition are better at penetrating armor than lower velocity projectiles. This makes them more likely to pass through the target although it also introduces fragmentation and tumble, which are concepts that we concern ourselves with a good bit, particularly from the military perspective.

@Brother Oni provides a perfectly adequate breakdown of the gap between armor and tissue penetrating rounds below:

As I understand it, the traits for good armour penetration capabilities are the opposite for what you want for lethality.

For good armour penetration, you want a hard bullet with a small cross section that retains its shape when it hit something hard.
For lethality, you want a large round which disperses as much of its energy as quickly as possible when it hits the target, preferably also fragmenting to maximise the hole made and the damage to internal organs and structures.

People are very soft when compared to steel, so something that retains its shape through armour plate tends to overpenetrate squishy people, leaving small wound tracts with less damage than expected. This was a reported issue during the recent Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts where hits from NATO 5.56 rounds were not incapacitating enemy combatants quickly enough.
Steel is very hard compared to people, so a soft bullet will just impact on or slide off the surface, expending all its energy and fail to penetrate through to injure the person underneath.

There are some subtleties involved here with modern materials (eg kevlar is a soft armour and uses that to absorb all the energy from an incoming round) and technologies (eg HESH shells use the shockwave propagated through the armour plate to cause spalling on the other side to kill the crew or damage internal components), but by and large, this generalisation is true.

Ideally, you want to hit that sweet spot where a round will penetrate but slow down enough to cause maximum damage to the target - this is why exit wounds are generally much larger than the entry wound. The issue is that what works for a certain thickness of armour at one distance and angle, may not work for a different distance/angle or for thicker armour at the same distance and angle.

What isn't adequately elaborated on however is the relationship between trauma and mortality (death.) My initial comments are intended to provide the a bit of a primer for the relevant part of the explanation.

"Getting shot" is almost never fatal. Both JFK and Abraham Lincoln survived (strictly biologically), if in vegetative states, for quite a long time after being shot directly in the head for instance. Phineas Gage survived being impaled through the head with a 3 foot long steel tamping rod and went on to live a long and (physically if not mentally) healthy life. Examples of this are almost as common as examples of people dying "from being shot" they just don't tend to receive as much attention since life has, quite literally, gone on.

A gunshot wound (GSW) is generally going to be the "mechanism of injury" rather than the "cause of death." In most cases blood loss, secondary or post secondary infections are what actually "kill."

Depending on the coroner or forensic examiner in question an autopsy report for a "fatal shooting" could be expected to read something like this:

"Exsanguination secondary to penetrative trauma (GSW)." Translated to English this means "victim bled out."

Secondary infections are things like septicemia from a "gut-shot" but they can be anything, in which case it might end up being the symptoms of the infection rather than the infection itself which cause mortality. Someone who is immuno-compromised by septicemia might die from the fever caused by the infection for instance.

Now, there is a flip side to all of this which I don't see being discussed, which is that even in instances where armor functions perfectly and prevents penetrative trauma a projectile can still cause mortality. The kinetic energy delivered still needs to be absorbed. A rigid armor like plate is actually going to be better at doing this than our modern armors are - even if the armor works it's less than fun to take one in the back - but it would still be possible for blunt force trauma to cause a contusion of the pericardium (bruising swelling the sac around the heart) which would

I'll cut it off there to avoid spiraling into the deeper, more technical implications of GSWs in trauma care, hopefully my information has been helpful to you all though.

[Brother Oni]

@Brother Oni provides a perfectly adequate breakdown...

Damning by faint praise?

A gunshot wound (GSW) is generally going to be the "mechanism of injury" rather than the "cause of death." In most cases blood loss, secondary or post secondary infections are what actually "kill."

Depending on the coroner or forensic examiner in question an autopsy report for a "fatal shooting" could be expected to read something like this:

"Exsanguination secondary to penetrative trauma (GSW)." Translated to English this means "victim bled out."

Interesting - does this mean that unless a GSW causes immediate clinical death, it's typically not classed as a cause of death?

I wonder a modern autopsy report would record for the cause of death for Carabinier Antoine Favreau...

Spoiler: Extreme acute exsanguination?

Show

[Haighus]

Damning by faint praise?



Interesting - does this mean that unless a GSW causes immediate clinical death, it's typically not classed as a cause of death?

I wonder a modern autopsy report would record for the cause of death for Carabinier Antoine Favreau...

Spoiler: Extreme acute exsanguination?

Show

Heh. I reckon cannons probably come under a different classification to gun shots :D

It makes sense to me that gunshots would only be the cause of death if they hit the brain-stem and caused immediate brain death, as brain death and permanent loss of consciousness is basically the legal point of death irrespective of other body parts (temporarily) surviving.

[Zombimode]

A gunshot wound (GSW) is generally going to be the "mechanism of injury" rather than the "cause of death." In most cases blood loss, secondary or post secondary infections are what actually "kill."

Maybe this is just my ignorance speaking, but to me this reads like the saying from Magic The Gathering: "Damage doesn't kill creatures - state-based Actions do".

[Haighus]

Maybe this is just my ignorance speaking, but to me this reads like the saying from Magic The Gathering: "Damage doesn't kill creatures - state-based Actions do".

It is relevant from an epidemiological point of view, which is what the cause of death is often used for. Knowing which factor most often kills as a result of a particular pathology allows research and resources to be targeted in reducing that impact.

Also important from a legal perspective- some causes of death are more preventable than others, and therefore saying someone died of a gunshot is not enough detail if they then died due to poor hospital management of the wound.

[Knaight]

Velocity has been mentioned as something that helps armor penetration and hurts tissue damage - that's not strictly true. Cavitation and other indirect tissue damage can easily get worse due to higher velocity rounds.

[Mike_G]

Velocity has been mentioned as something that helps armor penetration and hurts tissue damage - that's not strictly true. Cavitation and other indirect tissue damage can easily get worse due to higher velocity rounds.

That's true, but you need to have a very high velocity to get serious cavitation.

I don't think slower bullets do more damage to tissue. I think bigger softer bullets are worse at piercing armor but do more tissue damage, and smaller, harder bullets are better at armor penetration but do less tissue damage.

More velocity is more energy, which is always more damage. It's only a problem when you go through and out the other side that you waste any energy.

[Knaight]

That's true, but you need to have a very high velocity to get serious cavitation.

Sure, but if we're bringing in modern firearms as points of comparison those high velocities are suddenly relevant.

[Deepbluediver]

Damning by faint praise?

I wouldn't read to much into it- "adequate" is not an insult.

Interesting - does this mean that unless a GSW causes immediate clinical death, it's typically not classed as a cause of death?

I, too, am curious about the answer to this question, because it sounds kind of like a pedantic argument to me.

I mean, if you want to be REALLY technical about it, guns don't cause fatal injuries either. BULLETS do.

Maybe this is just my ignorance speaking, but to me this reads like the saying from Magic The Gathering: "Damage doesn't kill creatures - state-based Actions do".

The most basic paraphrasing of this (that I've heard anyway) is "It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden deceleration." I think I read that in a Darwin Award, but it probably has it's origins even further back than that.

[Vinyadan]

@rrgg Thank you, that's a really cool paper!

[Maquise]

Something I've been meaning to ask for a while. When White Harness was popular, how did people know who was who on the battlefield?

[Gnoman]

The guys you were in formation with were friendly. The guys your formation were shooting at were unfriendlies. That is pretty much all that the average soldier needed to know.


Officers used flags to determine sides. This is why standard-bearer is such an important job.

[Brother Oni]

Heh. I reckon cannons probably come under a different classification to gun shots :D

It's the same principle; lead ball propelled by gunpowder at high speeds, just the scale is different.

And hey, large calibre pistols are known as hand cannons, it's just that this one is more cannon-y and less hand-y.

[Deepbluediver]

Something I've been meaning to ask for a while. When White Harness was popular, how did people know who was who on the battlefield?

There are at least a couple of notable cases of militarys attacking themselves, though one of the most famous cases is apparently disputed. And I'm sure there are others that went unreported or have been forgotten to time.