Following the other thread about the .45, it has me curious.

Which one should someone go with? One of the biggest benefit of the 9mm is the lack of recoil. So is the +P's performance worth the extra recoil in your typical 3-4" barrel 9mm pistol?

According to the oracle +P doesn't perform any better.  Look here

With 9mm, I honestly cannot tell the difference with felt recoil between the 147gr P9HST2 and P9HST4 (+p) out of my S&W M&P Shield.  I can tell the difference (and to me its very slight) between P9HST1 (124) and P9HST2 (147), where the 147gr actually feels a little softer.  But that's just me.

9mm HST has been revised with shorter skivving and a 50fps reduction in nominal velocity, thus the new +P is the old standard P and some expansion will be traded for penetration.  Which version you get in your order I can't predict as I haven't ordered recently.  I'd call ahead.  

I recall someone on pistol-forum saying the change was due to some reports of jacket separation through auto glass.  As a civilian I'm disappointed by the changes as "people bullets" usually resemble heavy clothing bullets and velocity helps beat hard barriers like wood and sheet metal.  I valued the sharp edged, large expansion and high velocities of the original design, and I didn't find a significant recoil penalty to the +P over the standard P.

That's a pretty good argument towards +P, thank you for that info.

My Dept. did extensive testing before adopting the 147gr HST (standard velocity) for our Glock 17Ms

I attended some of the testing and shot the round through the shorter length G26 since ammo is provided for off-duty weapons.

The 147gr HST performed better than the 124gr and +P versions in our tests.

For 9mm I'm also a fan of the 147 grain standard pressure. For 45acp I use standard pressure 230 grain. But yeah the Federal HST is some good stuff no matter what you pick.

I've got the 147+P in all my 9's right now except for my Shield which has 150 standard pressure. My source for that is local and when that dries up I'll go back to using standard 147.

I don't have 147g +p (not sure they make it, or didn't when I made these spreadsheets).
124g +p underperforms standard pressure 124g in bare gel, slightly better in heavy clothing.  Both underpenetrate in bare gel.  147g is a much better choice in HST.



147g Ranger T is pretty good.  Better than HST in heavy clothing (by this data) and pretty good (not as good as 147 HST) in bare gel.  

Very busy, and likely have to download so you can zoom and pan, but HST and Ranger T under penetrated in auto glass.

Any ammo you get will likely be a compromise somewhere.  Figure what your odds are, and chose ammo based on that.  I live in Florida so chose all my ammo based on bare gel performance.  If you live up North I'd likely get a summer (bare gel) and winter (heavy clothing) load (147g HST summer, 147g Ranger T winter).  If you REALLY think barriers are more likely than not to come into play, pick based on that but you likely will compromise performance when no barrier involved.

You can't just say "+p is good/bad" or "Brand x is good/bad" (lots of good "brand names" perform poorly and the performance from one weight to another in the same brand can vary widely)


ETA: the Lucky Gunner Test shows the 124's are a little better/similar to the 147 HST.  This was short barrels, and only in heavy clothing so you have to keep that in mind (ie. may not apply to a full size pistol and light weight clothing)

Lucky Gunner used Clear Ballistics gel which is NOT analogous to properly calibrated 10% ballistic gelatin, nor consistant. Stick with the updated DockGKR list over on pistol-forum.com's ammo section and you'll be fine.  Last I checked, we're still waiting for an update on the redesigned HST results unfortunately, though I know the doc has some inventory.