Specialized time travel munition question time. Ultra-specialized, in fact: which *pre-1930 *pistol round would be the best for penetrating late-medieval plate armor?
To be specific, a late-medieval cuirass—a fair enough target, I think—which were, from the numbers I’m seeing, typically 2-3mm thick steel.
I must leave it into the hands of the experts here on how that compares to flat plates of modern steel, as would be used for modern bullet penetration tests, and what cartridge would be best for rapidly putting life-removal ports into one.
And “best,” I guess, could by further defined by “penetrates most reliably” followed by “reliably penetrates as the furthest distance,” if you want to get ultra picky.
So…can anyone help me out? (I, luckily, don’t “Need Answer Fast.” Not that that means much when time travel is involved.)
I would expect nearly any full metal jacket (FMJ) pistol round will penetrate through a mild steel or bronze cuirass. I think the highest sectional density non-Magnum (or equivalent) round which would be available before 1930 is the 7.62x25mm Tokarev, which will actually penetrate Class IIIA rated soft (Kevlar) body armor: Forgotten Weapons: ”PSM Shooting: 5.45x18mm vs 7.62x25mm on Soft Armor” (cued up on the Tokarev).
I would expect a 9mm Parabellum or frankly any other 7.6x or 9mm round would penetrate as well, albeit with variable terminal ballistics depending on the power of the cartridge. Cuirass was really intended to protect against the kind of smashing blows you might get from a broadswoard, mace, or war hammer, or for some protection while jousting with blunted tips, but its protection against spear, poleaxe, or bodkin-tipped arrow was not very good even when worn with an aketon or buff coat (although these could produce enough friction to stop the arrow from penetrating very far past the armor).
If this is a question of injury in eras before modern surgery and sanitation, pretty much any torso bullet wound is going to drag foreign matter into the wound channel and cause the wound to fester, very likely leading to eventual death, as would an attempt to remove it without being able to sterilize instruments.
Even if it did not penetrate, would one of these projectiles have been enough to stop Ye Black Knighte in his tracks, like knocking him off his steed, or saying ‘Zounds, yon fucker hurts!’
If you count the year of 1930, almost certainly 7.62x25mm Tokarev. It’s basically a souped up 7.63×25mm Mauser, which dates to 1896. One of the highest velocity production pistol rounds, it’s the FN 5.7 before it’s time.
Newton’s third law still applies. There is less energy at impact, thanks to drag on the bullet in flight, than there is transferred to the hand during firing.
Cavalry troopers, when that still meant horses, used to fire pistols from horseback without regularly falling off.
The hand involves more surface area than flesh at the point of impact to spread the force out. The armor and padding, assuming shots that don’t penetrate, is pretty good at spreading out forceful impacts. It is what it was designed to do after all. Ye Black Knighte probably has a fair amount of experience with similarly forceful blows.
Now firing the pistol at normal pistol range may well have an effect on a horse. Horses generally had to be trained to not freak out around gunfire. Just firing a blank as they charge might well make the noble steed decide to stop in their tracks…or turn and run.
This brings up an interesting point: What exactly does the OP mean by ‘pistol round’? Does he mean ‘a round developed before 1930 that can be fired from a pistol that existed before 1930’, ‘a round that was designed for pistols and existed before 1930’, or ‘a round developed before 1930 that can be fired from a pistol’? The distinction between ‘pistol rounds’ and ‘rifle rounds’ can get pretty fuzzy.
There are modern pistols that fire what are usually regarded as rifle rounds. I don’t think there’s one in production that fires .50 BMG (someone made some prototypes of one in the early 2000s but it never went to market AFAIK), but there are examples of others that fire high powered rifle rounds. They’re also generally much larger than what you typically think of as a pistol, they’d be more like a carbine. Something generally considered a rifle round fired from a pistol would be the best for the OP (probably not .50 BMG, as it’s really impractical in that caliber), but I’m guessing that they are not looking for a gun built with modern metallurgy that can fire a pistol round availible in the 1930s.
“A round that was designed for pistols and existed before 1930”—and, preferably, that can be fired from a pistol from the same era, I suppose. (The thought of designing a pistol round that can’t actually be fired from any contemporary pistol, though…almost Zen.)
The answer to this part depends to a great degree on the source of the armor. If the targeted armor is in or from a museum, almost anything is likely to penetrate it. I’m an engineer, not a historian, but it’s my understanding that nearly all of the plate armor in museums is ceremonial, and ceremonial armor is almost always unhardened. It has all those fancy details and flourishes, and those would be very hard to make so well if the steel were hardened. The stuff used in battle was usually beat to hell (as you’d expect) and not preserved in any special way. How many people do you know who are hanging onto bullet-hole-ridden ballistic vests from the mid-1990s?
You could easily harden ceremonial armor after the fact by heating it and then quenching it in oil, but that would discolor and distort it. This stuff was obviously bespoke, and distorted armor would no longer fit the intended wearer. It would be like throwing a suit jacket in the dryer and expecting it to fit properly afterwards.
Steel is most workable when annealed (completely unhardened). Annealed steel can be much weaker than high-grade aluminum—like, 25% of the strength of the aluminum rims on your bicycle.
2 mm of annealed steel would be pretty unlikely to stop most pistol rounds available in 1930. I’d be surprised if a .32 ACP round didn’t penetrate that barrier. (.32 ACP is considered fairly weak these days, and it was enormously popular in the US during the first half of the 20th century).
Missed the edit window (please, please can we extend it? I asked in ATMB, but as far as I can tell, this is considered settled, so my request and many others have been ignored).
I’d bet that ceremonial armor is usually a lot thinner than battle armor. I hear plate armor is so heavy it’s very difficult to move in. No monarch or other member of the ceremonial-armor target demographic would want to deal with that while knighting people or using giant scissors to open another strip mall.
Side note: When I was living in California, I knew a guy in the SCA who was an armorer. He had made himself a suit of Maximilian plate. He was also an avid black power pistol enthusiast. He found himself wondering one day how the breastplate would do against a black powder round so he went out back, put the cuirass up on a fence post and blew a hole straight through it, just about where you’d give yourself the worlds most painful appendectomy. “Cool,” he thought, and hammered the edges smooth on the inside and left the hole there as a lesson for people as to why they stopped wearing the stuff.
So, my guess is that pretty much any 1930’s era pistol round is going to go straight through, but the question was which is the BEST one.
Not sure what the OP is after, and I doubt he has a time machine…
But .38 special or .45 acp should do the job fine. Or very much ruin the knights day. And it fits with both available in 1930. I would prefer the .357 but it wasn’t around quite yet.
For non-expanding (full metal jacket or roundnose) ammunition, the larger diameter is better because it creates a larger wound channel provided it can penetrate to an adequate depth (FBI protocol is at least 18 inches in ballistic gelatin). So, I’d pick a M1911 pistol with 230 grain bullet. But even the relatively weak-powered SAAMI spec 9mm Parabellum would penetrate the cuirass and reach the penetration threshold.