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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MaxKaladin" data-source="post: 352213" data-attributes="member: 1196">You said Call of Cthulu.  This is set in the 1930s, right?  I'm pretty sure Sabot rounds were not available in the 1930s.   For small arms, anyway. You say you're fairly ignorant on the subject, so I'm going to include some basic definitions to make sure we're both thinking of the same thing since some of these terms get used to mean more than one thing.  I don't mean to insult you or anything.  Anyway, what a sabot cartridge (being the entire assembly you load into the gun to fire) does is take a small bullet (bullet being the part you actually hit stuff with to cause damage as opposed to the more generic coloquial useage refering to the entire cartridge) and use a kind of spacer (called a sabot, which means shoe in French, IIRC) to allow it to fit into a casing (the part that gets left behind) designed for a larger gun.  When you shoot it, the sabot guides the small bullet down the barrel.  When it leaves the barrel, the sabot falls away from the bullet, allowing the bullet to continue on its way unimpeded.  The reason your friend says a sabot will leave no rifling marks is because the bullet itself is not in contact with the rifling.  This is true, but the sabot is in contact with the rifling.  The sabot would have marks from the rifling on it and I would think it would be possible to find the sabot (or the pieces thereof) and piece together rifling data from them in a modern lab.  The trick is that the people who are doing the finding will find the sabot somewhere near where the gun was fired, probably within the first 30 yards of where the gun was, in a direct line from the spot the shooter was at and the target was.  I hope that helps.</blockquote>

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