[Tomcat088]

I haven't personally seen someone shot with a .45 while wearing a vest, but do realize that the vest changes everything. Instead of the kinetic energy being spread in the fluid and air of the chest cavity or abdominal cavity, all the energy is taken at a single point. The layers of the vest actually stop the bullet, so all the kinetic energy is delivered there, this is quite a different scenario than when a bullet actually enters the body and causes hydrostatic shock. I will not agree or disagree with your numbers because I cannot confirm or deny those, but I will comment on them some and some of the misinterpretation of data that you have made of those numbers.

The numbers that you listed have nothing to do with shooting through glass, they are through bare ballistics gel. It does not say what the consistency of the ballistics gel or if more than one shot was taken and measured, just that this was the numbers. That's the way it is for all the numbers listed on this site, it doesn't say how many shots were taken, so we don't know how reliable these numbers are. Also, 9.8" of penetration in bare gelatin isn't considered enough penetration to be an "effective" loading. Therefore I would have automatically taken another shot or two to verify data. Another thing you have to take into consideration is that most people shooting .40 S&W are NOT going to be shooting 135 grain bullets. Most of them will be shooting between 155-180 grain bullets, which carry more momentum and will penetrate deeper. I'm not sure if you're familiar with this, when bullets are made to expand and moving at the speeds that the .40 S&W is, they sometimes "blow up" and don't penetrate all that deep. You should realize that the 135 grain load is not the typical load that people shoot in their .40 S&W. Something else that I thought was funny is that they say that the .40 S&W violetly expanded and fragmented, but this isn't true. Your numbers say the diameter of the expanded .40 bullet was .56" and the diameter of the .357 sig bullet was .59. The .357 sig is a smaller bullet than the .40 bullet and it expanded to a larger size, so how the heck did the corbon bullet "expand and fragment" and the .357 sig did not? Also realize that different bullet weights, velocities, brands, etc, will expand differently under different conditions. Some manufacturers develop a bullet for a certain optimal velocity and weight. Then later they downsize this bullet to be less grainsand load it at other velocities. The performance from these loads will be different and not always the best design for the speed or load that they use it in.

I'll continue to talk about your numbers in a second post