Is the Sn-42 body armour in the game ?

[John Kettler]

c3k,

There's a lot more to the story.

The typical Civil War rifled musket caliber was .58, which is a big bullet. For the period, the bullet it fired was a high velocity projectile--one that held its velocity very well. Thus, soft lead, big and tumbles like the 5.56 when it hits, rapidly dumping energy into the target. Soldiers found notching the business end caused what we'd call mushrooming, making the projectile even nastier in terms of terminal effects. Also, the skirt, given any sort of projectile flip over on entry, apparently made a good inadvertent hollow point.Worse, the somewhat misnamed Minie ball of .58 caliber packs the same weight as a .69 musket ball. While the initial MVs are roughly equal, by 100 yards, the musket ball starts running out of steam, whereas the Minie can quite readily kill out to 300 yards. To a first approximation, the Minie hits at ~50 fps more than the .45, but it's .13 caliber larger. If the .45 is a man stopper, then what's a Minie ball. Side note. The reputation of the .45 as a man stopper was based, not on the .45 ACP, but on the .45 Long Colt. It was found to stop even the hopped up, tightly torso bandaged Moros. The .38 Long Colt was woefully inadequate to the task.

The Minie, upon impact, thus had much greater effective width than its caliber would suggest, with an increased attendant likelihood of hitting a bone in the event of a limb strike. Strikes which didn't hit bone tore, not punched, through the flesh. Centuries of musket fire before the rifled musket became the principal infantry weapon left treatable wounds a good deal of the time, but Minie balls tore apart the victims. Those annular grooves were simply phenomenal when it came to dragging everything they hit into the wound, resulting in mass occurrence of gangrene casualties. These factors were why Civil War dressing stations had terrible stacks of amputated limbs outside them. Battlefield medicine wasn't equal to the task.

Jacketed AK-47 bullets do indeed pass cleanly through (stable projectile) and leave holes if nothing vital is hit, but a Minie ball even today would tax the skills of a combat hospital surgical team, for the damage would be simply ghastly. The AK-47 bullet isn't even in the same league as the Minie ball when it comes to effective transfer of impact energy into the target.

Regards,

John Kettler

[Clubfoot]

Officially dubbed the most humorless thread. Taking ourselves even more seriously in 3...2...1...

[c3k]

Gangrene takes time to occur. The amputations during the battle were purely due to shattered bone. No limb can be saved when the bone is splintered along its whole length into toothpicks.

Modern trauma centers may save one or two limbs thus injured per week. Emphasis on "may".

[Lt Belenko]

No I didn't. I just used it as an opportunity to increase my post count.

Michael

Never let a good post count go to waste.

[TheBog11]

You have to beat the game to unlock the body armor. Didn't you read the manual?

[LukeFF]

And never mind that your "joke" really wasn't funny.

Michael

Which is the same way I view many of your posts.

[Michael Emrys]

Never mind that I already knew all of what you posted, given that I was a medic in the military.

Yes, we have all heard about that now. And BTW, congratulations and thanks for your service, and I mean that most sincerely.

But not everyone here has the advantage of your experience, and my post was aimed at them. Don't take it as personal, you aren't the only one here.

Michael

[John Kettler]

Bulletpoint,

Was looking for Russian manpack FT assault footage when I came across this. I can't speak to the model numbers, but these are Russian combat engineers in body armor.

Regards,

John Kettler

[altipueri]

"During the Civil War, 24 percent of the 29,980 amputations performed by U.S. Army surgeons resulted in fatalities, a figure greatly exceeded during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), when fully 77 percent of the approximately 13,000 amputations performed by French Army surgeons resulted in death." (Cribbed from somewhere).

I'm surprised the ACW survival rate was so high. Nowadays I think if you are alive when you reach the aid station there's a 90%+ chance you will live, hence there being so many multiple amputees from recent wars.