The Next Generation Consoles

[Doc]

How did this thread turn into a gun thing?  Oh well, I shall take this opportunity to ask a question.

I once watched a show about the weaponry used in Ye Olden Days.  They were talking about muskets.  They said that muskets were pretty devastating due to the fact that they launched a relatively slow-moving projectile.  It was enough to enter a body, but not enough to exit.  The projectile tended to make some pretty severe turns when it hit a human body based on the density of the flesh it encountered.  If you were shot in the shoulder, the musket shell could sort of bounce around and end up in your heart.

Is this true or was that show just feeding me a line of BS?  Ever since I watched that show I am more afraid of being shot with a musket than I am of being shot with a high-powered sniper rifle.
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Oh that's totally true.

Under battle conditions, when they dropped balls, er, that sounds so sexual, but when they pressed musket balls in the molds they often didn't wait for them to cool properly and would flop them out someplace. So they would wind up sort of egg shaped. Now, take a heavy high grain lead slug that is soft. Almost putty like. You could pinch a musketball with your fingers some times, or push your fingernail into it. Take this wad of lead egg shaped putty and fire it at low velocity. In the air, it wobbles a bit. Depending on the lead and the flash heat of the shot, it might actually start to spread a bit in the air. So you have this blob of lead that is starting to expand and go from egg shaped to tear shaped slamming into a human body at low speed. It would enter the gut, spread out ever more, slam into the skin of your back, which would act like a net or a landing pad, the skin would catch it, stretch way out, and then snap back into place launching the ball through your body in all sorts of ways only a physics professor would understand. It might bounce up, and then bounce off of your rib. It might shatter... Forming shrapnel bouncing in several directions, or, it might spread out like a lead pancake inside of your body doing disgusting things as it bounced around using your guts like a trampoline.

In Washington state I went black powder hunting with a Hawkins 80 calibre musket. I shot an elk. The bullet caught him from the side, just behind his front leg. It was a good clean lethal shot. Elk went down. I cut his throat to make sure his suffering had ended. We found the slug when we were butchering the beast all the way back in his rump, lodged in the somewhat splintered remains of his pelvis. Lots of tumble damage. Mind you, this is an ELK. That's a big powerful animal. For a human, it could, and would, be a lot worse. And Hawkins rifles were common arms for all sorts of armies and malitias long ago.