Hello everyone! I was comparing the ballistics tests of different cartridges and now I have a new conundrum! Lucky gunner has tested the Winchester Ranger .45 230 JHP and the Hornady 10mm 155 XTP which makes me wonder what is more important, bullet expansion vs energy?

The .45 has a muzzle velocity of 855fps and muzzle energy of 400ft-lbs while the 10mm has a velocity of 1265fps and energy of 551ft-lb. Both seem to have a have closeish penetration, but the .45 has a final expanded diameter of 1.010” and the 10mm has a 0.68” final diameter.

I personally would think that the bigger expansion would stop a threat faster in a self defense scenario, but my understanding of wound ballistics is very limited and hope someone can chime in with more insight.

Thanks!

There is no hard and fast rule. Ballistic gel does not wear jeans, move or bleed. Given adequate penetration, shots on target and placement will trump caliber every time.

Calibers and energy means nothing at times, I’ve seen many videos and read reports on OIS where the individual is shot multiple times center mass and continues to move forward and or fight, it’s amazing what someone can and will do even after being shot multiple times, especially if on drugs, the only real one stop shot is to the head.. the best thing is get off as many rounds as possible on target and create holes and internal damage..

Neither expansion nor energy kills anything.   Damage to something that can't be lived without kills things.   Expansion and energy may assist with that, but shot placement and penetration do 99% of the work.   Everything else is relatively negligible in terms of handgun effectiveness.    Shoot an attacker (2 legged or 4) solid in the brain or spine, and it will go down in it's tracks.  Shoot it on the heart or major artery, it will bleed out enough to pass out in probably less than a minute.   Shoot it anywhere else, and you probably still need to shoot it again, and ASAP, unless the attacker decides to back off and stand down on its own.

^ that's handguns - rifles generally produce enough shock and awe to do a better job of damaging things.   But even then, it's not absolute - I have watched more than one deer take a 308 Accubond to the heart and lungs, and still run 100 yards (on 3 legs, because one front leg was wrecked) in the 15 or 20 seconds it took before it lost consciousness.  Post mortems showed the heart and/or aorta blown apart and both lungs shredded.  

Anyway, to get to the point - expansion is good, up to the point it impedes penetration.   Energy is good up to the point it makes accurate follow up shots hard to do fast.   A 6 nch hole in a non vital area won't do squat in the short term, and a .22 inch hole in the head is lights out instantly.  

I'd say mileage may vary, but in this case it won't.

I agree with you, for the most part.  It is a complicated subject, and some people just like to muddy the waters.

However, it is not a great deal of difference, while difficulties in actually shooting larger calibers can make it sensible to choose a smaller caliber cartridge of less power.

Doesn't mean the smaller caliber is as effective in a side by side comparison.  I don't understand why people insist on this idea.

The simple answer when actually shooting humans or animals is too many variables!
There are tons of “one shot stop” stories with every caliber from 22 short up to 12 gauge shotguns, and also stories of people taking multiple hits from heavy calibers without seeming affected at all.

As mentioned shot placement plus adequate penetration trumps everything else.

Pick the gun/ caliber you can shoot accurately and control adequately and then select a street proven bullet design for the ammo to be carried.

This last sentence above is critical. For some people the caliber might be 9mm for others 357 magnum or 45 or 10mm etc.

To go along with the old phrase every bullet you shoot on the street has a lawyer attached to it, ability to hit accurately is something people simply don’t put enough stock in.  If you go to the range under calm controlled unstressed conditions and shoot a fist size group at 7 yards and proclaim “ good enough” you are fooling yourself.  A respected instructor I trained with stated whatever group you get on a static range under stress will be 2-3x the size it was on that paper target under gunfight conditions. People or animals do not remain still for you to shoot them. That fist size group becomes dinner plate size, and if the adversary is thin, standing sideways or at an angle, this would result in a lot of misses.

I may be very old school in this regard, but I believe it was Bill Jordan who said speed is fine, but accuracy is final. While you certainly need to work quickly in a fight when lives are at stake, getting rounds on target in the right location is what matters, and if you have to sacrifice some speed for effective accuracy placement you had better slow down then

A large part of the confusion exists because different criteria, different metrics, and different definitions are used, comingled, cherry-picked, and then mixed with a huge amount of anecdote (only a very small portion of which is relevant). It's no wonder the arguments continue.
A few points to consider, based on autopsying literally thousands of GSW cases over 30+ years:
1)  If you shoot well and your chosen load behaves properly, the person you shoot is not going to the hospital: they are going to the morgue. We skirt around this uncomfortable truth in our discussions of "stopping power" (whatever that is) by correctly preaching the "physiological stop" (incapable of further action) over the far more common "psychological stop" (ceases action to avoid getting shot more). The former results only from destroying or severely damaging critical central nervous system and/or circulatory system structures. Survival time for these injuries is measured in seconds. They'll be dead before 911 is even called, let alone make it to the hospital.
2)  Because of that, any anecdote coming from a hospital setting represents a failure of the shooter (poor accuracy) and/or the bullet (primarily inadequate penetration).
3)  All the fretting and heated debate about this or that caliber / cartridge / bullet weight / bullet design, etc. generates lots of heat, but very little light. The fact of the matter is that any of the typical self-defense cartridges / bullets make wounds that are so similar in the human body as to be indistinguishable from each other. Yes, that's heretical, but it's also true. Like everyone else here, I've been looking for the Holy Grail of cartridge and bullet. I've been autopsying GSW cases since the late 1980's at dawn of the wound ballistic Golden Age, with FBI's HWFE Report and IWBA, and I've seen the results of the marked advances in bullet design over the years. But the fact remains that all those advances have not so much pushed the envelope, as made bullet behavior in people reliable.
4) It boils down to what we've always known: only good hits count. It's not enough to just hit the target - you have to be able to "see" inside the body and aim at the organ you want to hit, not a particular point on the outside of the body. If you can reliably put a bullet into the brainstem or aortic root at any angle, it doesn't much matter what you're shooting. If you can't, then you're relying on gangbanger / police "spray and pray" accuracy by volume and hoping you accidentally hit something important. In that case, it also doesn't much matter what you're shooting.
5)  Pick something reliable that you can shoot accurately and quickly, load it with whatever ammo it likes, spend a lot of time looking at 3D models of the inside of the body, and practice, practice, practice.

PLACEMENT is the most important factor - a hit to the Brain CNS is going to stop combat sooner than a hit to a foot or hand.

Neither "Energy" not "Expansion" really matter if the projectile has not PENETRATED deep enough to strike and damage something "vital" causing quick incapacitation.

Once you get PENETRATION depth then EXPANSION comes into play as making a deep hole WIDER will facilitate blood loss faster and increases the possiblity that the projective strikes something vital on its way through the target.

Energy is not actually very important as is PLACEMENT & PENETRATION & EXPANSION.  A round with more energy may drive a larger bullet deeper into a target and provide enough umph to cause that bullet to expand to it's maximum diameter.   But "Energy" as a determinant is less important than the placement of the round into the target, and the ability of the projective to cut a deep & wide path to the vital organs.

Energy (because it favors high velocity) becomes perhaps more important on rifle rounds where speeds of about 2400 fps or greater cause more hydrostatic shock from the velocity of the round than do slower rounds.

Bigger_Hammer

Because extensive studies of actual handgun shootings consistently show that pretty much any handgun cartridge of sufficient horsepower to consistently produce adequate penetration (which does indeed rule out some cartridges), produces dead bodies and/or ended confrontations the same percentage of the time.   Sure,  it's not intuitive, as we all expect more horsepower to produce better results; that seems logical.    But once we have enough power, real world results show that having more than enough power does not buy us anything extra in terms of real world effectiveness.

Also, to be clear and fair, those same studies also show that round nose FMJ does not produce ended confrontations with the same percentage as expanding or flat nose bullets (although the numbers are not nearly as far apart as you'd think).  So there is some use to expanding bullets, and if the bullet is going to expand, it takes a certain amount of energy to produce adequate penetration with that expanded bullet.   So no, nobody is saying a 25 ACP FMJ is just as good as 200 grain 10mm.   But 9mm vs 40 vs 45 vs 10mm...  Assuming a bullet that expands a bit and is driven hard enough to penetrate the spine/brain/vitals of whatever size critter you intend to shoot, then anything in that neighborhood will do the same job.

For me, I want penetration first,  then expansion.
I  don't care about energy as long as it gets me there.

Kind of hard to say that when you consider a blank or a miss may also produce an instant stop.  To get an actual answer would require millions of well documented shots under identical situations.  Since there is no way to do that, we have to rely on poorly documented situations which really don't tell us much.
Results will be similar.  They will be close.  They won't be identical, however.

A blank or a miss don't produce a physiological stop.  They produce a psychological stop.  And many thousands of cases have indeed been studied, and the results are as ManBat and I and others are saying - once you have enough, more than enough is a moot point, because dead is dead.   You don't make things more dead because a more powerful cartridge was used.

Blanks and misses are indeed psychological stops, however, they occur, and count in statistics.  There is a theory that the greater the flash and blast, the better the results, though again, impossible to filter out statistically.

I don't worry about death, I want an assailant to cease his attack.  Statistically, there is some evidence that the old lead and FMJ handgun bullets are actually more lethal than hollow points, even if they don't do as good a job at stopping assailants.

I don't think any one believes that modern hollow points have not increased 9mm's effectiveness.  Yet some how, those advancements in bullet design didn't improve .45 ACP.  Really?  As Julie Newmar would say, "That does not compute".  You can rationally choose a smaller caliber, just don't try to say that it is as effective as a larger caliber on a side by side basis.

I do significantly better with a 45 than a 9, but I think the difference there is standard vs subcompact frame

So a better way to look at it works to see which one requires the least amount of energy to expand? Both the rounds I stated in the post have very close penetration through heavy clothing ballistics gel gel

No actually, because if the round requires “less energy” to expand, this almost always means it will penetrate inadequately

A long time professional hunter and guide once said with proper bullet placement a lowly 22LR could kill any animal on the planet, but the key still goes back to shot placement, and to achieve a kill on a very large animal especially, this shot location may need to be incredibly precise.

A century ago there were very skilled hunters that pursued dangerous game who were advocates of the 22 savage high power, which was basically energy wise the equivalent of not much more than a 223. No one would chase lions in Africa with a 223 today!

Those skilled hunters got great results with light calibers due to extreme skill in shot placement

I do not care about velocity or energy. Recovered diameter and penetration are what matters as well as (obviously)  shot placement.

Looking at the original post, both velocity and energy go to the 10mm, while expanded diameter goes to the .45, and penetration is a wash.  So your philosophy would pick the .45, (as would be my choice of those two options, everything else being equal).  Not a great deal of difference there, but enough that it could be detected if you had a very large data base to draw your conclusions from.  The conclusion that some have drawn that a 9mm's terminal ballistics is equivalent to that of a .45 is incorrect.  That doesn't mean that a 9mm isn't a superior cartridge for use, though.

You’re right 9mm has caught up to 45 in certain aspects but it would be wrong to believe that 45 wasn’t improved either.

Penetration>Expansion
Energy as in foot-pounds doesnt really tell you much about the ability to kill or how efficiently or fast it will incapacitate. Energy may not even be a good measure for how much it will recoil.

A .223 firing a .40gr V-Max going 3400 fps may have 1200 ft lb's of energy. Meanwhile a 44 Mag firing a 240 gr SWC bullet at 1200 fps may have around 600 ft lbs of energy. Which would you take to hunt bear?

Neither expansion or energy are good measures of how "deadly" or "effective" a given cartridge or caliber may be. Bullet construction, mass/diameter/sectional density are also very important.

How much penetration should I be looking for is above 16 in too high?

Depends on your intended target. Self defense against people? 12-18”

Deer hunting or self defense against moose you may prioritize greater penetration

People seem to forget this.  Against a moose, you might well indeed be better off choosing a semi-wadcutter.  Most all JHPs assume a semi-spherical shape rather quickly.  Though it is shorter, and may be less likely to yaw.

Would 17.5 inches of pen be toeing the line too close considering that’s an average out of 5 shots at 10 feet?

Ideally against a moose I wouldn’t have a handgun

In my opinion, no. Misses are a greater bystander risk that shoot throughs.

Carrying a long gun everywhere is not practical most places.

I want two holes on my target as two is better than one...entry and exit.
I want my bullet to expand as much as possible as wide bullet will make bigger wound channel and dump more energy on target than narrow bullet.