[Ar-list] Effectivenss of modern body armor

[Carter T. Butts]

John W Pierce wrote:
> Bart Kosko has an interesting article on the effects of getting shot while
> wearing modern soft kevlar body armor:
> 
> 	http://sipi.usc.edu/~kosko/
> 
> Second one under "Selected Publications".

That's a great link -- I must say that I didn't expect to see terminal 
ballistics work from Kosko, but then one never knows what people will 
wind up working on.

> 
> Basically, if you're wearing modern soft kevlar armor, then getting shot
> with a .22 is about like getting hit with a 40 mph baseball when you're
> unprotected, and getting shot with a .45 is similar to getting hit with a 90
> mph baseball while unprotected.
> 

Some caveats are probably in order regarding this, of course.  First 
off, living tissue seems to be pretty difficult to model well in the 
context of terminal ballistics -- ordinance gel is reasonably good, but 
what I've read elsewhere suggests that it's still not that great a 
model.  Secondly, the ballistic wounding process is tricky, in part 
because of the importance of temporary deformation (i.e,. the shock wave 
associated with the bullet impact) in causing acute injury (e.g., 
falling over :-)).  But hey, nothing's perfect, and this is probably a 
much better model than is being used at present.  In particular, this 
can definately be used to calibrate the damage transference modifiers 
for soft armor, which would otherwise have to be essentially made up 
from raw speculation.  I need to go trace back some of these references....

Again, great stuff.

-Carter