BigMikey76
New member
The best thing about train hunting, though, is that if you don't get a "dead right there" shot, it is easy to follow their tracks...
For George hill(Mad Ogre)
- Thread starter mikthestick
- Start date
You could maybe stop a train with a bumble bee, but that bumble bee would have to be going at pretty near light speed. It wouldn't be so much the impact of the bee, but more the tunguska like explosion as that gram of matter broke down into its subatomic components.
But, even if we tried that, I'm not so sure it would stop the train. Vaporize the lomotive, derail the rest of it, but stop it DRT? nahh. You'd need at least a possum at light speed to do that.
mikthestick
New member
Disapointment
I certainly agree with most of what everyone has said, however I think stopping power formulas have some value, which is best or most like reality I don;t know.
I have found some info on a study that suggests a certain sized hole in a certain sizes animal will PROBABLY cause the animal to collapse due to low Blood pressure in 10 seconds perhaps that is the way to go.
My disappointment is that we cam design aircraft to go Mach2, put men on the moon but we can't use maths to predict what a bullet will do to an animal.
I certainly agree with most of what everyone has said, however I think stopping power formulas have some value, which is best or most like reality I don;t know.
I have found some info on a study that suggests a certain sized hole in a certain sizes animal will PROBABLY cause the animal to collapse due to low Blood pressure in 10 seconds perhaps that is the way to go.
My disappointment is that we cam design aircraft to go Mach2, put men on the moon but we can't use maths to predict what a bullet will do to an animal.
BigMikey76
New member
Designing an aircraft or a lunar lander is an excercise in physics and engineering. Those fields use math as a way to calculate the responses of predictable forces and materials as they interact with each other. The problem with trying to calculate stopping power is that you are throwing biology into the mix. Biology is messy. It is also far less predictable than physics because it involves living thinking beings whose reactions will vary from one instance to the next (in this case, both the hunter and the prey).
On one hand, I agree that it would be handy to have a nice neat equation that could predetermine my hunting success. On the other hand, wouldn't that take some of the challenge, and therefore some of the fun, out of the hunt?
It's like the weather. Even with the widespread monitoring of conditions, it's still impossible to accurately predict the weather past about 14 days. After that interval, the best you can do is rely on past data for highs, lows & averages. The problem isn't a breakdown in the math, the problem is that in order to predict accurately you need access to a HUGE amount of information, and even then, unless it's infinite and the calculations are performed with infinite precision, the solution will rapidly degrade (a couple of weeks into the future) into the historical condition data.
If you tell me everything about the specific animal (not a particular species--I'm talking about a particular INDIVIDUAL) you wish to shoot then it would be possible (though not easy or fast) to predict, with reasonable probabilities, the most likely outcomes if that animal is shot with a particular bullet, travelling at a particular velocity that impacts at a certain impact point and travels a particular path through that animal. One would also have to factor in states of alert of the animal, physical condition/health of the animal, any unusual organ positioning or size inside the animal, responses to particular stimuli based on actual testing of that particular animal, the activity of the animal at the time in question and possibly some other things that just aren't coming to mind at the moment.
With some smart guys, a lot of money, and a lot of time, a team could work the problem for, say several hundred impact points and paths through the particular animal you're interested in. I don't have a super good feel for the level of effort involved, but I'd say for the first go around it might take a year to get everything working just right.
Then you'd have a huge chart of what's likely to happen if you shoot this animal at this point from this angle with this bullet at this velocity when he's involved in this particular activity and at this particular alert level, etc. You could probably make an app out of it to run on a handheld computing device of some sort.
All that would be applicable only to the animal you provided the information about although it might be reasonably applicable to animals which are VERY similar to the one you provided the information for. I'm not just talking the same species, I'm talking the same size, weight, condition, sex, ones which exhibit similar responses to similar tested stimuli, etc.
After that, it might only take a few weeks--maybe even a few days for you to get the same information for another specific animal once you had all the information for that animal to feed into the system.
After you had provided the information for a lot of animals that were reasonably similar, we could start looking at the data and looking for some commonalities that might simplify the problem.
Then, guess what we would find out. We'd find that best results are obtained by shooting an unsuspecting animal through the heart/lungs or CNS with a fairly large caliber bullet going at high velocity.
Just like the weather problem. If you try to generalize the prediction too much it degrades to the historical values for that day and all the work you put in on the solution doesn't really add to your knowledge of what the weather will be like on a day too far in the future.
igousigloo
New member
I have been hunting for many years and seen a lot of shots and have come to the conclusion that if you want to stop a freight train in its tracks with one shot, then the bullet should weigh as much as the freight train.
to make matters simple, chaos is king, we are the peasants, and the wise men who claim to have beaten chaos are the jesters.
john nailed it. an elk is not a water balloon, or a 1/16" inch steel plate.
An inch here or there is the difference between a cleanly severed aorta and burst heart muscle and a much less serious lung injury.
to use his example, the weather forecast was for warmer days, you left your insulated gloves in camp, and your aorta shot was ruined by your numb trigger finger.
john nailed it. an elk is not a water balloon, or a 1/16" inch steel plate.
An inch here or there is the difference between a cleanly severed aorta and burst heart muscle and a much less serious lung injury.
to use his example, the weather forecast was for warmer days, you left your insulated gloves in camp, and your aorta shot was ruined by your numb trigger finger.