Flintlock Ballistics gel

[VulpesForge]

It's a little bit of a silly medium, but I hadn't seen many ballistics gel tests done with black powder and a ball and thought this may be interesting to some of you.

The Tl;Dr is that they're amazingly powerful within 100 yards or so and they fairly closely resemble the damage from a 1oz 12 gauge shotgun slug.

With a little understanding of the qualities of soft lead and the approximate velocities and weights, this shouldn't be terribly surprising, but it was still quite interesting to see.

 

[WillH]

I watched that video the other night and was really surprised (perhaps ignorantly) at just how powerful a .54 round ball is. Really impressive how hard it hits

 

[Mgderf]

I watched that video the other night and was really surprised (perhaps ignorantly) at just how powerful a .54 round ball is. Really impressive how hard it hits

Twenty years ago I shot a doe at point blank range (10') with a .50cal muzzleloader.
I was sitting behind a fallen tree root ball.
The doe walked up from behind and was dead even with me when I raised the muzzle.
She saw me at the last second and stood up on her hind legs to turn around when I hit her square in the breast bone.
It flipped her over on her back like a rag doll.

I was astounded at how hard it hit.

 

[Ark]

Yup. Lead round balls in the original calibers are insane against unarmored human targets.

 

[Leadeye]

Soft lead cast bullets in black powder cartridge arms are hard hitters. I use soft lead hollow base bullets in my 41 Colt 1877 revolvers, probably should do some sort of test someday to see how much they flatten out.