D&D 5E Why do guns do so much damage?

[Steampunkette]

Shotguns do not have either of those things, and pistols have rifling (not that it matters that much with a 6 inch barrel).

12 gauge shotgun slugs travel around 1500 fps, which is very close to a .69 caliber (16 gauge) Musket balls 1200 fps.

Muzzle velocity - Wikipedia.

Subsonic, no rifled barrels, both of them.

But fine - here is how a musket fares in the same tests:


And in this video, they are literally firing ACTUAL 400 year old medieval musket balls into things:


Ballistic jelly at 6:07 above. It utterly pulps it.

Now imagine one of them in the chest or head and the kind of implosion it would cause.

You just ignored two incredibly relevant posts...

The first video you linked of these two is one that @PsyzhranV2 linked 2 posts up and that I went through, in -detail- describing how awesome the descriptions were, how accurate the discussion of gunpowder was, and how it came out to the same muzzle velocity (Exactly) to the previously referenced study. Seriously, that is a -wonderful- video that provides reams of useful data that we can discuss!

I then went over the wound channel (The hole through the ballistics gel) and the non-perforated disruption channel around it. Like literally look at the post above your "Rebuttal" here.

The second of which shows a musketball fired from a modern shotgun. He claims that it'll be moving 1200fps. Which, if my math isn't terrible, is right around 360m/s. Slower than the musketball fired in the first video at 414m/s, but about the same speed as the tumbling cuboid of lead.

You then say that the Ballistic Gel is "Utterly Pulped" but we're not shown what it looks like after the impact. Just the gummy bears jumping up off the table.

What kind of gunpowder was in that shell? What was the actual muzzle velocity? How much damage was actually done by the musket ball into the ballistics gel? These are things we never actually see.

But if that second set of gelatin is "Utterly Pulped" at an unmeasured but declared lower velocity and we saw the actual damage done by a similar round at a higher velocity... Then your definition of "Utterly Pulped" is a bit suspect. Then again, Utterly is a superlative so I guess exaggeration is to be expected.

Though that does lead to an interesting question that neither video offered: What's the Gelatin's density? Depending on how much or how little gelatin you use in making the gel it can be more or less durable. I wonder if the guy explicitly trying to show off big bombastic visuals without going into actual scientific details might be using a lower gelatin mix to create a more dramatic visual of impact?

It would certainly reflect well Taofledermaus's channel in general, where he shows off dramatic and strange ammunitions to best visual effect...

 

[Flamestrike]

OP, you've assumed Hollywood movie fiction that 'bullets punch neat little holes in people'.

That's not what they do at all (unless you're very very lucky). They impart a tremendous amount of joules into the human body, on account of the human body 'braking' the bullet as it attempts to pass through it, which destroys nearby tissue (organs they hit, plus seriously damaging neighboring ones).

You might get lucky and have a bullet pass through you, missing the important bits. This is called 'overpenetration'. Supersonic rounds are designed to avoid this via 'tumbling' to counteract the speed they are traveling and their small size, which enables them to deliver all their joules into the human body instead of overpenetrating (making them extremely deadly).

The odds of a subsonic .69 cal musket ball overpenetrating is low. You're stopping (or dramatically slowing) that entire slug, travelling at 400 meters per second, with the inside of your body.

Its like how the current naval ship mounted railguns work. You only need to fire a relatively small round (just 10kgs) at speeds of Mach 7, and you wind up delivering 32MJ (32 million joules) of energy on target, utterly vaporizing what it it hits.

 

[RobJN]

A bullet puts a finger sized hole in your body.

Going in, maybe. Coming out? It could be quite a bit larger. If you're lucky, you'll get a through-and-through. If not, the bullet will tumble, ricochet off bone, splinter, ricochet some more, and then exit. If its had to punch through armor? Well, not only is it now massively deformed, but that deformed slug of metal is now careening through a torso, or arm, or leg....

 

[Oofta]

Going in, maybe. Coming out? It could be quite a bit larger. If you're lucky, you'll get a through-and-through. If not, the bullet will tumble, ricochet off bone, splinter, ricochet some more, and then exit. If its had to punch through armor? Well, not only is it now massively deformed, but that deformed slug of metal is now careening through a torso, or arm, or leg....

It's also potentially lost almost all of it's momentum, not hitting a vital spot and so on.

Sometimes one bullet will kill you, sometimes a couple dozen will not. The real question is, what's fun for the game?

 

[Steampunkette]

@Flamestrike unless your torso is 75cm thick (about 30 inches from the front of your chest to your back) that musket ball traveling 414m/s is going to overpenetrate. The point of Ballistics Gel is to simulate the relative density of a human body. Granted it ignores things like air in the lungs or the specific density of muscles compared to fat, but it averages out without including bone specifically.

The musketball went 30 inches through that gel. That means if you're only 12 inches "Deep" from your chest to your back it will have enough force to overpenetrate by an additional 18 inches of solid meat. Meaning three people standing chest to back with 12 inches of depth (oo la la!) will all get shot and it won't come out of the third person having only penetrated about 6 inches.

Which means that force continues with the ball. Which means you don't get all of the Joules.

Now if it hits a particularly dense piece of your body it will stop. Such as the Femur, which is a big thick dense bone that -might- be sturdy enough to stop the ball, in which case all of it's Joules will be absorbed.

But otherwise? Basic fundamental physics says that not all that ball's energy is going to remain in your body 'cause it's gonna pass through you.

I'm just gonna ignore all the rest of your "Railguns" and "Supersonic Rounds" and "Bullets" talk 'cause it's just meant to be big impressive numbers and words to cow me. Right up there with your initial insult that I've "Assumed Hollywood Movie Fiction"

Watch the video, read my breakdown of it, and maybe stop trying to imagine all primitive firearms are just as deadly as modern ones, please.

Going in, maybe. Coming out? It could be quite a bit larger. If you're lucky, you'll get a through-and-through. If not, the bullet will tumble, ricochet off bone, splinter, ricochet some more, and then exit. If its had to punch through armor? Well, not only is it now massively deformed, but that deformed slug of metal is now careening through a torso, or arm, or leg....

Which is why in the OP I explicitly mentioned:

Depending on your ammo type a gun is going to put a fairly small hole in the front of your target and a moderately larger hole out of the back of your target with a relatively straight line between the two.

But this thread is also about early firearms in D&D which fire lead balls instead of bullets. Balls don't tend to tumble. Also of note there are several videos in this thread showing what early firearms did to armor! The results are a bit surprising, honestly. I didn't expect plate to stop a musket shot at close range, only maybe deflect it somewhat, or reduce the speed of the round before it entered the body beneath. Instead you get to watch the ball just bounce off, flattened and deformed, leaving a nice radial dent!

 

[Steampunkette]

Hey, here's a video by the same guy discussing the speed and joules of a Wheellock Pistol being fired!


The ball is going at around 319m/s, higher than the 253m/s I previously looked at. And has around 660 joules at 25m. Meaning it retained about 90% of it's joules from firing at 738J!

But the paper cartridge started at 271m/s, closer, and ended up at 242m/s. So it's probably a loading difference more than anything. 536J at the muzzle, 427J at 25m.

Both MASSIVELY LOWER than the 2,000-3,000+ Joules we've seen claimed.

Hmm! Maybe we should just run through this guy's whole channel. He clearly knows what he's doing and what he's talking about when it comes to Period Firearms.

Hey... I just went back to the "Napkin Math" where I used a bunch of online calculators to get the Joules from a Pistol back on page 5.

Oh hey! Wait. The actual muzzle velocity of a flintlock pistol, on average, was 253 m/s. I got a message from a friend about it!

That drops the pistol shot down to a mere 416 Joules and 3.28 Newtons. About 60psi.

Nifty!

Check that out! My "Napkin Math" was only about 11 Joules off at the 25 meter mark. Nifty!

Maybe I'm not the idiot that some people clearly think I am!

 

[Doug McCrae]

Basic fundamental physics says that not all that ball's energy is going to remain in your body 'cause it's gonna pass through you.

The following excerpt is from 'Manie dangerous woundes and shotts': The physical impact of gunshot wounds in the British Civil Wars:

It was therefore much less likely for a bullet to exit the body from a Civil-War firearm than a modern weapon. It was common for the ball to remain within the wound, requiring removal. Numerous commentaries in contemporary seventeenth-century medical treatises describe methodologies for removal of the bullet (Rutherford). The prevalence of instruments such as the 'terebellum' or 'tirefond' bullet extractor (a long instrument with a screw tip for drilling into the soft lead of the bullet in order to extract it), as well as diverse types of forceps used to grasp a bullet within the body, suggests that the need to extract a bullet from the body was common.​

 

[Steampunkette]

The following excerpt is from 'Manie dangerous woundes and shotts': The physical impact of gunshot wounds in the British Civil Wars:

It was therefore much less likely for a bullet to exit the body from a Civil-War firearm than a modern weapon. It was common for the ball to remain within the wound, requiring removal. Numerous commentaries in contemporary seventeenth-century medical treatises describe methodologies for removal of the bullet (Rutherford). The prevalence of instruments such as the 'terebellum' or 'tirefond' bullet extractor (a long instrument with a screw tip for drilling into the soft lead of the bullet in order to extract it), as well as diverse types of forceps used to grasp a bullet within the body, suggests that the need to extract a bullet from the body was common.​

Very true! You do have a lotta bones to hit. And deformation of the ball can cause some problems.

But. Survivorship bias is a thing. These tools that you reference were used to pull the bullets out of surviving patients. But it does not go into the number of dead with exit wounds.

It may be that a shot which created an exit wound was much more likely to kill you during the civil war.

 

[jmartkdr2]

The issue with guns in DnD is you have to pick only one of the following: realistic-ish, Hollywood-like, or balanced-for-play. Any one priority excludes the other two.

 

[Flamestrike]

Also of note there are several videos in this thread showing what early firearms did to armor! The results are a bit surprising, honestly. I didn't expect plate to stop a musket shot at close range, only maybe deflect it somewhat, or reduce the speed of the round before it entered the body beneath. Instead you get to watch the ball just bounce off, flattened and deformed, leaving a nice radial dent!

Of course heavy plate stops muskets. It stops even more than musket rounds.

You forget I'm Australian:

Ned Kelly (December 1854 – 11 November 1880)[a] was an Australian bushranger, outlaw, gang leader and convicted police murderer. One of the last bushrangers, he is known for wearing a suit of bulletproof armour during his final shootout with the police.

Ned Kelly - Wikipedia

Over a dozen 19th century high calibre rifle and pistol bullets failed to pierce it at 50m.

Look mate, guns are more lethal than swords. We're straying into katana fangirl territory here.

When i get a chance Ill try and dig up some casualty reports from a war that features casualty counts (separated by blade and by bullet) and I reckon you'll find the fatality rates for firearms per victim higher than that for edged weapons per victim.

Musket balls are more lethal that sword swings. The overwhelming number of edged weapon strikes result in defensive wounds. Gunshot wounds far more often than not just generally killed you.