"OK, so how good is a 50 Cal?" Topic

I was having a chat with a guy at work today, and he said a 50 cal round could cause serious injury even by just missing you!

I thought No Way! – its just a big MG with a bit of armour penetration ability.

However, I have been known to be wrong, so what do the informed folks on the Hive mind that is TMP think?

Might be able to rupture an eardrum, in a close pass, but otherwise, I'm pretty sure the projectiles have to hit you to do damage.

If they hit a person, the damage will be pretty catastrophic, I suspect, e.g. removal of limbs, or head, getting cut in half if more than one round to your mid-section, etc.

The rounds carry a lot of energy, and pack a real wallop.

Your colleague is speaking out of his behind.

he said a 50 cal round could cause serious injury even by just missing you!>

I imagine a close call would cause serious weight-loss…

A .50 Cal. round pretty much has to hit to cause real damage. I've had some land very close to me. I'm still here and I wasn't injured. Freaked out all to hell, but not injured.

Nobody doesn't like Sara Lee.
Nobody also likes being down range of a 50 cal.
Apparently MythBusters did a segment on this?

link

Ah, myths!

Did you know that Japanese officers could cut through the barrels of machine guns with their swords?

Sever risk of lead poisoning if it doesn't miss

Close call = laundry problem.

As others have said, the round really isn't large enough to cause some sort of concussive damage as it passes by.

-Will

Depends on how awkwardly you land when diving for cover.

You'll need alot of cover. Most dwellings don't stop the rounds.

If it hit something next to you . fragments of blocks and wood .

What Rrobbyrobot and Saber 6 said.

I've fired a few and had some similar come back at me.

Eric

Actually, I found out that the mud houses in Afghanistan will stop 50cal. I couldn't believe it when I went inside and saw that it didn't penetrate. Apparently 3 feet of mud brick will stop it.

Utter tosh, I'd say.

There are a couple of related phenomena he might be getting confused with:

Cannonballs were known to cause fatalities in a near-miss – they called it "wind of ball" in the 1800's. I've seen it referred to as 'subcutaneous contusion' which – as you'll know – is a term so vague as to be useless.
I'd venture pressure-induced pneumothorax/haemothorax from the shockwave.

The 'Big Fifty' won't do anything like that. The round doesn't have the cross-section to cause sufficient air displacement as it passes.

The idea of some kind of shockwave injury tallies with one particular shooting-range myth that a near-miss from a .50 cal would "tear the skin off your face with the suction": fun but obviously complete nonsense.

The other thing he may be getting confused with is the issue of hydrostatic shock injuries. Real enough with any high-velocity round, but the bullet actually has to hit to produce the effect.

If one is pointing in your direction, there is an overwhelming desire to dig a hole in the ground and bury yourself in it. If you are the one pointing it you need to listen to it very carefully for the tell tale signs that it is about to jam. Once jammed, many bruises, cuts, scrapes and expletives ensue.

Mythbusters already did a segment on the whole "wind of ball"-----those near misses were really hits.

If you hit a modern block wall with a .50 cal, the fragments can do quite a bit of damage to anyone behind it.

YouTube link

As all of the above have dismissed the "near miss kill" myth….

If the .50 does hit you, its bad. That is a heavy bullet, and will do extensive damage. The energy is over 13,000 ftlbs…. for comparison, a standard 7.62mm NATO (7.62x51) is something like 2,500 ftlbs, a standard 5.56mm NATO is like 1,300 ft lbs [for these military cartridges, actual bullet weight, ammunition used, and barrel characteristics, make these numbers dance around quite a bit]… oh, lets throw in a .44 Magnum, 1,000 (or more) ftlbs. All of this energy, of course, drops over distance. However, with that much energy to start with, the .50 round remains lethal for a LONG distance.

Also, because the bullet is so heavy, it remains fairly accurate in flight, even with wind at distance [I am not a ballistics expert, but this is my understanding…. lighter bullets get pushed around over distance by wind].

So while a near miss won't kill you, an actual hit is pretty severe. There is more to it than just the "energy" value, but…. The human body won't do well to absorb that much energy all at once.

So I'd recommend finding a goshdarn deep hole to hide in.

Chalfant

I once read that any body hit (torso/head) was generally considered as "fatal" in most cases. Limbs tend to be pretty bad/lethal.

I was taught (right or wrong) to aim the MG at the feet of the troops attacking. The rounds/fragments dirt rocks ect.. would also wound troops. And we were also taught grazing fire ect…
Back then the idea was to wound rather then kill troops. This usually takes 2-3 more people out of the fight as the wounded fellow needs help.

I've been near them being fired at machine gun shoots, and they sure get your attention. I expect that being downrange would scare the crap out of you, even if being missed doesn't actually hurt.

Chalk the "kills you with a miss" up to all the other firearms myths, like being thrown through the air when shot, or firing a shotgun knocking the shooter over.
-Kle.

well if it hits an abject near you, could make for a bad day. like a small bomb going off.

My one and only .50 cal story. Returning from a date in Tooele I got onto Redwood Rd behind a convoy on its way back to Camp Williams. Several guys were riding in the troop truck right in front of my VW Beetle, and one of them had his arm casually draped over the butt of a .50 cal. I caught his eye, then took both hands off the steering wheel and made two fists side by side and shook them, like was holding the handles and shooting. He smirked, then stood up, swung that monster till the barrel was pointing just over my roof, and ripped off a short burst. The bullets hopefully landed in Utah Lake! I laughed hysterically and swung out and around them, and kept passing trucks until we passed Camp Williams. My date was not amused.

imdb.com/title/tt0822854

The expert in the "extra features" says that at that range the round is dropping at a severe angle and a head hit would cause the entire upper body to explode from the impact. Impressive. Then he said that needless to say, the film makers couldn't put in a graphic detail quite that realistic!…

He smirked, then stood up, swung that monster till the barrel was pointing just over my roof, and ripped off a short burst.

During my military days, I did spend some time on a truck bed with a 12.7 mm MG (usually safely packed in a box for transportation), but I don't think that we would never even considered firing one outside a safe, designated firing range. Not that we would have had access to live ammunition outside such an environment, either.

I would presume that the guys superior might not have been too amused to find out that he was shooting the beast from a moving vehicle on a public road. And certainly that was not a pleasant experience for the eardrums of his fellow soldiers (who probably were not packing ear protection).

Thanks guys! I will pass your informed (and entertaining) comments on to the chap who made the initial claim.

Well done fellow TMPers! – and Thank you!

Not that we would have had access to live ammunition outside such an environment, either.

That was my immediate response: nobody is that crazy, but he looked that crazy. For years I believed that he had shot blanks. But it sure was loud enough. His buddies shouted at him.

Then I met, "The Crazy Ranger", a friend who was already a Vietnam vet, with two tours as an Army Ranger, and healed wounds that had left him for dead. I told him my experience with the bed mounted machine gun. He asked me for a detail: "Did the end of the barrel have a gas check in it?" I told him that the end of the barrel was spitting fire about a foot long, or so it seemed to my shocked senses. He said that no way was that Ma Deuce shooting blanks without a gas check. So, after that little detail was cleared up, my story got even better!…

Put it all into perspective.

The allies were plenty afraid of the MG-42. It was operated in bursts to conserve ammo. So when you were hit by an MG-42 you were probably going to take multiple bullets. Like a large shotgun blast only with bullets.

The M-2 is a much slower firing weapon. As mentioned above, it is also a very high velocity weapon. If you got hit by one, you were likely going to take only 1 round. However, that round would do considerable damage to organs from the energy being dissipated. Germans soldiers were as much afraid of the M-2 as we as Allied soldiers were of the MG-42.

One of the things to consider when a person is hit by ANY bullet is that the bullet will not only cause a small wound to the body but it will also cause significant trauma to the surrounding area of the wound. So a body hit will also damage nearby internal organs. Now, assuming Chalfant's calculations are correct, the wounded area would be something like 5 times greater from a 50 cal round than that of a NATO 7.62 round. Or to put it another way, if you get hit anywhere in the torso by a 50 cal round, you will probably die.

though all MGs are fired in bursts to conserve ammo.

Rate of fire is sort of key here.

Most Allied MGs fired about 500 rpm
MG-34 fires 900 rpm
MG-42 fires 1500-1800 rpm.

So a burst from an allied gun might be 2-3 seconds long for the same amount of ammo expenditure of an MG-34 or MG-42 with just a 1 second burst…a tap of the trigger really.

This would easily translate to a tighter pattern and many hits if the gun was on target.

This would easily translate to a tighter pattern and many hits if the gun was on target.

The MG-42 had problems delivering a "tight pattern." Not that it needed to, with all the lead it threw down range, but accuracy was not one of its virtues, regardless of how short the burst was.

You always fire in bursts. Even if you can fire hundreds of rounds per minute, you only have a small amount of ammunition on the belt, maybe 50-100 rounds at most for a .50 cal, outside of aircraft.

That said, a miss would not hurt you, but the force of being hit almost any where would probably take people out of the fight. Lots of people have survived being shot by a .50 or 12.7mm though.

The M2 is a lot of fun to shoot!

Most guns you can 'walk' onto your target if you can see your strikes, making hitting things pretty easy if you have the ammo.

Edit:

Sand bags and earth stop all bullets pretty easily, including .50 (or even 20mm).

Most rounds will not go through even a single sand bag, and you wont find much of the round left either. They basically disintegrate when shot into sand.