"Firearm hitting and penetration power" Topic

Any good videos on actual penetration effects for 16th-19th century pistols and arquebuses smoothbore/rifled muskets?

Seems like there are a lot of accuracy reviews but no actual penetrating or wound studies.

It's a broad series of firearms but any studies on any areas such as the Brown Bess, Minie ball or Italian Wars arquebus would be useful.

I have always wanted to do exactly this with my reproduction Brown Bess.

Try this:

PDF link

The History Channel did a Series on this very subject covering Firearms and Artillery from the 17th – 19th Centuries. They demonstrated the effects firing various rifles, muskets, & pistols into blocks of gel, and artillery into plastic barrels set in various numbers of ranks. The results were scary and enlightening to say the least.

Search YouTube, History Vault, or the Internet to see if you can locate at least some of the videos!

It seems like there was a fair amount of discussion about the penetrating potential of firearms against armor during the so called Renaissance era.

Is this the series?

imdb.com/title/tt0393852

Well judging from the average size of a muusket, grape, or shrapnel round during this period you can be fairly certain that when you see the movies depicting a soldier falling forward when hit, the director has obviously never fired a gun in his/her life and have no clue what they are talking about.
A projectile of the size normally used in this period, i.e. 1/2 inch (12.5mm) or larger would throw them backward quite forcefully. Not sure about penetration though. Would require a lot of energy to push a blunt projectile of that size through armor. The massive trauma of such a blow probably does more damage than actual penetration.

You can read also Scharnhorst – Über die Wirkung des Feuergewehrs, 1812

YouTube us full of them. Search ballistic gel.

hi there

>>>>>>>>>>>A projectile of the size normally used in this period, i.e. 1/2 inch (12.5mm) or larger would throw them backward quite forcefully.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Newton is not on your side here, forces being equal and opposite. If the force was sufficient to knock back the target it should also knock back the shooter.

Most people when shot do nothing and then crumple when they realise they have been shot or if the projectile hits an important internal structure.

I imagine that a running person could be tripped up by a shot.

evilgong
I agree with the forces involved but the force on you is transmitted thru the area of the musket stock thru your shock absorbing shoulder while the force in the bullet is concentrated in a 1/2" dia. bullet.

There are tales, of course, of (small?) shooters being knocked down by the recoil when they fire a sizable weapon.

Evilgong is correct here. It's a question of conservation of momentum; e.g. If a 75kg (165 lb) soldier advancing at 2mph (approx 1m/s), is struck by a musket ball of mass 40g (approx 1/16 lb) travelling at 325 m/s in the opposite direction, the effect of the musketball would be to reduce his forward speed to 1.6 mph. There would be no Hollywood special effects of the soldier being blown backwards through the air. (The same result would be obtained of the musket ball was replaced by an equivalent mass of lead shot, too).
Figures for typical mass and velocity of musketball taken from
MSc Thesis, DAVID P MILLER, "Ballistics of 17th Century Muskets", May 2010, Cranfield University.

Men who have been shot by a rifle round fall down because they are in agonizing pain, because they lose consciousness, or because they have suffered debilitating injuries that prevent them from standing any longer.

For the many details that might distract I always thought this sequence from Barry Lyndon captured the spirit of a confrontation of infantry in the age of the smoothbore musket, particularly the understated depiction of the effect of each volley (being an unrecorded skirmish, there was no messy artillery, of course). (Kubrick had the knack of depicting battle rather well, I thought)

try YouTube. They have people doing videos shooting everything with everything.

Someow the Barry Lyndon link got lost:
YouTube link

There is this guy who hacks up pig carcasses with Dark Age weapons:

YouTube link

It's too bad there aren't videos of muskets fired on pig/cow carcasses to show how bad the wounds might be.

During the ACW the United States Government conducted a study to determine what could be determined from the attitude of a body on the battlefield. They employed several artist to draw images of the dead and make notes as to location and direction of the firing that killed the soldier. Although they discovered several interesting positions of death. They concluded that, no conclusion could be made about the direction of fire in relation to the position of the body. There are just too many variables.

You guys obviously never watched "Mythbusters" great show, debunked many TV and movie "myths".

debunked many TV and movie "myths"
-including….?

<8~)

It was pretty funny when they shot a frozen chicken out of a cannon once if that's any help ;-)

Cheers,
John