Effects on the body when armor stops rounds?

[Koshinn]

I have no plans or interest to test that out myself

That's too bad. You have a scientific approach to things that would be interesting!

[C-grunt]

During our rookie year as cops a good friend of mine got shot with a handgun during a traffic stop late at night. The bullet hit her ring finger and then hit her dead center in the chest. She was wearing level IIIA armor (soft) at the time. She had some bruising but she said she was more focused on the finger which she ended up losing.

[Mr blasty]

I think the biggest factors here would be adrenaline levels and how people cope with stress. I would have to think that the majority of people falling over would be do to startle response.

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[WillBrink]

That's too bad. You have a scientific approach to things that would be interesting!

Not my area of expertise, but in serious mode, if I had the math background, my dream job would have been either a cosmologist or ballistician/ballistics researcher.

[Arctic1]

From a physics standpoint, the key factor is momentum.

A 7.62 round, for example, has significant kinetic energy (KE, 1/2m*v2), but it has an insignificant Momentum (m*v) - not nearly enough to move a human being.

A baseball bat being swung, for example, has a much lower KE, but more momentum seeing as it has a high mass.

This is not to say that people won't fall over, but the impact momentum of the projectile is not the cause.

[JusticeM4]

I've heard some people say that getting hit with pistol rounds while wearing soft armor is the same effect as someone throwing a baseball at you.

I imagine taking a hit of rifle rounds (5.56 or 7.62) while wearing ICW or AR500 plates, the plates would distribute the force/energy of the bullet across the entire plate, and you would feel more like a slight push.

This is all hearsay and speculation of course, since I have no experience or background on this.

[ALCOAR]

I've heard some people say that getting hit with pistol rounds while wearing soft armor is the same effect as someone throwing a baseball at you.

There might actually be some scientific evidence to support that bit of thought.....

"Gunshots produce bruise patterns on persons who wear soft body armor when shot even though the armor stops the bullets. An adaptive fuzzy system modeled these bruise patterns based on the depth and width of the deformed armor given a projectile's mass and momentum. The fuzzy system used rules with sinc-shaped if-part fuzzy sets and was robust against random rule pruning: Median and mean test errors remained low even after removing up to one fifth of the rules. Handguns shot different caliber bullets at armor that had a 10%-ordnance gelatin backing. The gelatin blocks were tissue simulants. The gunshot data tuned the additive fuzzy function approximator. The fuzzy system's conditional variance V[Y/X = x] described the second-order uncertainty of the function approximation. Handguns with different barrel lengths shot bullets over a fixed distance at armor-clad gelatin blocks that we made with Type 250 A Ordnance Gelatin. The bullet-armor experiments found that a bullet's weight and momentum correlated with the depth of its impact on armor-clad gelatin (R2 = 0.881 and p-value < 0.001 for the null hypothesis that the regression line had zero slope). Related experiments on plumber's putty showed that highspeed baseball impacts compared well to bullet-armor impacts for large-caliber handguns. A baseball's momentum correlated with its impact depth in putty (R2 = 0.93 and p-value < 0.001). A bullet's momentum similarly correlated with its armor-impact in putty (R2 = 0.97 and p-value < 0.001). A Gujarati-Chow test showed that the two putty-impact regression lines had statistically indistinguishable slopes for p-value = 0.396. Baseball impact depths were comparable to bullet-armor impact depths: Getting shot with a .22 caliber bullet when wearing soft body armor resembles getting hit in the chest with a 40-mph baseball. Getting shot with a .45 caliber bullet resembles getting hit with a 90-mph baseball."

Modeling gunshot bruises in soft body armor with an adaptive fuzzy system.

[Koshinn]

90mph baseball? Ouch.

[CoryCop25]

This is a hit from a 40 cal pistol from about 6 feet away. The armor was ABA Extreme level 3a. The bad guy took 5 hits and survived and the officer would have been DRT if it weren't for the armor. The officer did not know he was hit until another officer pointed out the hole in his shirt.
The picture was taken two days after the shooting. Notice the thread pattern burned into the POI.

[JusticeM4]

90mph baseball? Ouch.

Depends on who's throwing .

Also we all know bullets have different weights and different speeds depending on caliber and barrel length. A 9mm vs a 40 or 10mm round would have different resulting forces (obviously). so a shot of a 10mm to a soft armor may feel like 90mph, while a 9mm would be like 50mph (just guessing).

Either way, I prefer not to be hit with a bullet or a baseball.