Playing The Long Game!

Gary Wain takes an extended view of the perfect pellet conundrum.

Last month, in my quest to find out what makes the perfect pellet, I looked at the heavy hitting .22s in order to see just what sort of damage they would do to our much molested ballistic material, which if you remember is actually a terracotta wax used in the arts and crafts community.

This month, I’ve decided to look at the effect that increasing distance has on the pellet with respect to its impact on the ballistic material. To do this, I’ve taken three different weights of domed .177 pellets and shot them all at both 15 metres and 40 metres. So what do we expect to happen? Will the increased distance slow the pellet down to the point where it lessens its impact crater? Or will it slow it down to the point where the decrease in velocity will enable it to give up more of its energy to the material, and thus increase the ballistic effect on impact? Would the effect be the same for the heavy and the light pellets? Or would it be more pronounced in one or the other? I think I know, but one thing I’ve learned when conducting these experiments it that not everything behaves the way you expect it to.

THREE PELLETS