Skirata129 wrote...
In the codex description, it says that firearms shave off a miniscule chip or pellet of metal and then accelerate it using a mass effect field. Well, this is all well and good in the confines of the game world. However wouldn't this suffer from the same problem that 5.56 ammo does on a much bigger scale?
5.56 ammo is notorious for "zipping" through the target with no knockdown power whatsoever as the high velocity combined with FMJ means the bullet doesn't expand and leaves a relatively tiny hole. The Bad Guy might die of bloodloss, but he'll have plenty of time to get you beforehand unless you hit him in the head or an artery.
So how does a tiny pelet of ammo presumably even smaller than a .177 pellet or bb have the ability to kill without a perfectly placed headshot? even if soft metals were used, the metal wouldn't flatten or fragment enough to cause serious injury.
Ahh, terminal ballistics, an interesting subject worthy of discussion.
I will start out by mention something about 223 Remington / 5.56 NATO. Military issue ball ammunition will sometimes fragment due to the copper jacket being thinner at the cannelure (the indented portion of the projectile that the case mouth is crimped in to). M193 55gr ball will usually fragment at 2700 fps or so, or higher. Reliable fragmentation range is greater when the round is fired from the M16A4's 20 inch barrel as opposed to the 14.5" barrel used on the M4 carbine. M193 is no longer standard issue, however. Current standard issue is M855 62gr ball, which has poor fragmentation characteristics. It more frequently "zips through" as you mentioned above. Even a zip through hit, however, will be far more destructive than a handgun round would be. And if a 5.56mm round fragments upon impact.....well, you don't want to be on the receiving end of that, trust me.
Now, with that said, even without expanding ammunition, ME firearms would be more destructive. There is an effect that is sometimes called "remote wounding effects" associated with projectiles impacting a badguy at very high velocity. Some people claim it's hydrostatic shock. I don't exactly know what it is, I just know that a projectile moving fast enough can damage a badguy in places the bullet doesn't physically contact due to energy transfer associated with the impact itself.
With modern ammunition, this "remote wounding effects" threshold is somewhere around 1700 feet per second. It can vary depending on the weight of the projectile. For this reason, most handgun rounds will not cause remote wounding effects (for example, 9mm loaded with 124gr bullets tops out at around 1100 feet per second, and 45 Auto firing 230gr bullets tops out at around 850 feet per second). Handgun rounds will simply cut a hole in the target. This is why self defense experts stridently recommend the use of hollow points as defensive ammunition in handguns; a hollowpoint will expand and make a bigger hole in the target than it would otherwise.
Rifle rounds, which tend to move at
much higher velocities, WILL cause these remote wounding effects. I also think it's pretty safe to say that the projectiles used in Mass Effect move at velocities much higher than those of modern firearms. There's a cutting edge area of study known as Hyper-velocity terminal ballistics, which studies the terminal effects of projectiles moving at multiple kilometers per second. Current applications are in studying how to protect spacecraft from micrometeor impacts, but it's plausible that ME firearms would also fall into this velocity range.
Given that ME firearms likely fire projectiles at a very high rate of velocity, I think it's safe to say they produce significant remote wounding effects in the target, and certainly won't lack for terminal effectiveness. It's also likely that a small, hyper-velocity projectile has a greater chance of defeating an enemy's armored suit if trends on body armor remain the same as they are today.
Modifié par jamesp81, 19 juin 2011 - 04:52 .
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