Bullets: Sizes, Calibers, and Types (2020)

Yeah fudds haven't made up the bulk of the gun scene since the 90s really.

I hope that since people in video games can use use a wide variety of weapons we get some push back against banning specific gun types. Opening the MG registry would be really good and maybe this is a way to encourage it, same for removing suppressor and SBR regulations.

Btw there is some intersection between the two, a lot of the guys behind the 3d-printed gun movement are moving to decentralized technologies for chat, video hosting, etc. because the gun-grabbers running mainstream platforms don't like them.

> Even with some significant headwinds on social media, gun culture influencers have huge audiences, slick media production, and run the gambit from highly technical to meme fueled gif parties.

As I read that, I heard the words and voice "If you've ever been ..." bounce around in my head. It's the start of a phrase uttered by a very popular YT gun channel on youtube before each video.

> I think hn and tech culture in general is sleeping on the rise of popular gun culture.

2020 saw a significant rise in first time gun owners. The NSSF estimates 5+ million.

I own a gun, I considered buying more too for a time (before ammo got really expensive) and I have friends and acquaintances that really like guns, and have several. I really don't see how software/tech could improve the experience outside of marketing and maybe some wiki-style education, if that's where you're going with your comments. Part of the appeal is the purely mechanical aspects of firearms and another is the actual experience of shooting.

I was once called an expert in external ballistics, this may have been an overstatement but I did spend quite a lot of time writing simulations for the ballistics of various bullets.

There are three phases that are important for bullets: what happens inside the barrel, what happens outside the barrel, and what happens when it strikes the target.

There are a lot of parameters effecting that characteristics of all three. (not just 2 dimensions of size)

Shape, muzzle velocity, reliability, ease of manufacture, etc etc. are all quite important.

There is also long history, a gun is a thing that can be around for decades; you can't so easily throw away the past and start over. There is also a strong consideration for the design process. Fulfilling a set of requirements can conflict with the desire for standardization. Also when standardization is an idea, using an existing standard rather than making a new one has been the pragmatic response.

NATO though has done quite a lot in standardizing American rounds. There are many almost-equivalent NATO standard rounds with things like metric measurements instead of the more historical American measurements.

But also, things are just complicated. When talking about an airplane you might as well say that length and wingspan might "go quite a long way" in describing it. I mean, in some sense sure, but a very long way from fully describing one.

There's a book "American Rifle" which goes through quite a bit of the history of the development of guns in the US.

Because there's a ton of organic growth over more than a century and a shitton of holdovers. Think of it like really old legacy systems in computing.

Like look just at naming: old stuff was often named based on caliber and the number of grains of powder back in black powder days. Like the .45-70 is a .45 bullet and had 70 grains of black powder in a standard load. But then this carried over when they named the .30-06, which had a .30 bullet and 6 grains smokeless. Some handgun rounds are "ACP" because they were developed for new (at the time) auto-loaders instead of revolvers. Now cartridges are mostly named by caliber.

Then there's stuff where cartridges were slightly tweaked, like for NATO. .223 is mostly the same as 5.56 and .308 is mostly the same as 7.62, but the latter are both NATO rounds re-named and changed a bit from their predecessors. Oh and by the way, .308 rifles can typically fire .308 or 7.62, it's not safe to fire .308 from a 7.62 rifle though. Oh but for .223/5.56 it's the other way: You can fire .223 from a 5.56 chamber but not vice versa.

Every country developed its own rounds for a long time, just look at the number of 9mm cartridges there are. Different bullets, different nomenclature, etc.

There's a ton of variety in how you make a bullet, even beyond "broad" varieties like hollow point vs jacketed vs semi-jacketed vs wadcutter vs semi-wadcutter... or the actual metal composition of the bullet, jacket, etc.

Different rounds are also loaded differently, you can have some under-pressured for subsonic if you're running suppressed, there's usually some variation in what's "standard" and bodies like SAAMI and CIP are voluntary and typically define max pressure only. Plus there are overpressure (+p) and over-overpressure (+p+) rounds...

Lots of complexity from over 100 years of a lot of people developing their own ideas than merging them only sort of.

You have to go one layer deeper and think beyond the projectile (bullet) and include the cartridge (bullet, accelerant, primer, case).

Basically how fast some thing shoots (how much accelerant) is just as important as what you are shooting (bullet characteristics).

Each of those variables also have weight and dimension penalties which determine how much you can reasonably carry.

An interesting relatively recent example is the development of small caliber armor piercing rounds. NATO needed something to deal with the rise of body armor. Same requirements, two different solutions to get there in the fn 5.7 and hk 4.6x30 (simplifying enormously here). Basically these are engineering and manufacturing challenges.

> there's not that many parameters to define what a bullet is and does

There's a surprising amount of parameters that define what a bullet is and does. Consider this article, which describes the difference between secant and tangent ogives.

From an engineering perspective, long range shooting is FASCINATING!

http://bulletin.accurateshooter.com/2011/03/tangent-vs-secan...

> In particular, wrt physical dimensions, my - probably naive - take is that (radius x length) seems to go quite a long way in describing a bullet.

that doesn't describe much of a bullet, and nearly nothing about a caliber.

you can take a look at the SAAMI specs and get a sense of what goes into such things.

https://saami.org/technical-information/cartridge-chamber-dr...

the popular name of a caliber is exactly that, a name, and describes the caliber about as well as "John" describes a human being.

For the bullets themselves, in addition to the diameter and length you've got mass, material and shape (round nose, hollow point, ballistic tipped, etc.).

For the cartridge as a whole you're also going to be concerned with powder capacity, shape (necked?, rimmed?), and to a lesser extent material.

These are just a few examples and all are significant.

What would the upside be in “simplifying” it? At present, there’s a known set of standard ammo sizes in use, and millions of guns in existence that use them.

Sure, the nomenclature is weird, with a mix of imperial, metric, and just plain weirdness, but it doesn’t seem to be negatively impacting anything.

I think this is yet another area where large budgets and low accountability creates "innovation" primarily in how to spend public money. Large police and military budgets create incentives for manufacturers to innovate away from the standard and introduce "high performance" proprietary form factors.

In some cases a new round size/weight does actually produce better performance for the desired application. In many cases, IMO, those advantages are academic and achieved in highly controlled environments, i.e. they are nullified by the high variability of other factors, in real world situations. I am just an enthusiast and not any kind of professional though.

Because there's a lot more than caliber that matters. If you think about it, a .45 ACP is close in caliber to a .50 BMG. But there's hella powder behind a .50 and not so much behind a .45. The bullets themselves make a big difference also, there are at least a half dozen you can read more about here: https://gunvault.com/types-of-ammunition/

If you think having 2 cartridges that both have .38" caliber bullets is confusing, take a look at all the 9mm ones. Just in the ones that are actually called 9mm and not just caliber equivalent, there's 9x19, 9x25 mauser, 9x57 mauser, 9x39, 9mm winmag, 9x18 makarov, and a ton more I can't remember. Some of those are rifle cartridges, some handgun. They have different bullets with different characteristics and different bullet lengths and different bullet weights. And the shape of the cartridges behind them, the guns they fire from, and the amount of propellant each one has is all different.

the full name of .38 is .38 Special, and the full name of .380 is .380 ACP. IIRC, .380 ACP was so named to distinguish it from an earlier related design, .38 ACP. In common use, if somebody says .38 they're referring to .38 Special as that's by far the most common cartridge with .38 in it, and if they say .380 they're definitely referring to .380 ACP, though it's also sometimes referred to as 9mm Browning.

ETA: and in the case of both these rounds, .38" is actually the approximate diameter of the _case_ not the bullet; the diameter of .380 ACP bullet is 9mm, and the diameter of .38 Special is .357".

Former gun owner myself as well back when I lived in the sticks. Would carry on walks in my "yard" because of injured, hungry, or otherwise dangerous wildlife.

> Movie frames featuring sainted action heroes, gun out-thrust.

This is the sort of thing that gives firearm owners a bad rap. Especially those who advocate for self-defense rights. Everyone already thinks firearm owners are gung-ho cowboys with itchy trigger fingers. The majority are not.

Do you have a problem with those terms? If it makes you feel better "stopping power" is at least half a meme these days, from all the old fudds talking about "muh stopping power" with their .45 1911s. And yeah a bullet makes a wound channel? This stuff is just as relevant of you're hunting or similar.

And no, birdshot may not stop a big person. Hurt like hell but often won't kill. I personally don't have a shotgun for home defense though, 9mm hollow points in a PCC do the job fine.

Anybody who's not an idiot wears ear protection when shooting but a few shots won't damage your ears much. But yeah a 9mm handgun is significantly less bad for these reasons. Thank the feds though, it's damn hard to get suppressors without tons of paperwork which would otherwise make this less of a problem.

I mean, it's a bit difficult to compare and contrast various bullets without talking about stopping power and wound channels.

You could use euphemisms or be more technical, but in the end you're comparing a thing made to transfer kinetic force and create a hole, on its ability to do those things.

And yes IMHO, a pump action 12ga birdshot reduced-recoil load w/ a standard slug at the end of the magazine is hard to argue against if we're honestly talking home defense load.

Wait, it's not about game development??