M855 at 500 Y

[WillBrink]

I look at M855 like a decent back up stash round. Does nothing particularly well, but ANY reliable rifle ammo is valuable and appreciated.

That's how I view it. Good bulk stash ammo. Would not choose it as primary SD/HD ammo, especially from SBRs/PDWs.

[Disciple]

But Iraqgunz used to get the warning notices electronically on Lake City production issues. And he told me you'd be surprised at how many issues there are with our Mil ordnance. (More American Mediocrity in motion)

Do you think the Norma SS109 is better?

[okie]

M855 was hitting $1ea plus at the height of the last fairly recent panic...seems to be settling around $.50 today.

My last purchase was at $.35 & not sure we'll see those prices again.

The last time I bought any it was about 25 cents a round. I hear gun and ammo sales have fallen off of a cliff over the Summer, so we could very well see prices for Lake City back in the .30s. Now that manufacturing is cooling down across the board, the raw materials might be coming back down in price.

[okie]

In fairness, the Author of Blackhawk Down did EXTENSIVE research. So the portrayal of anything in the book was as reported to him.

It's been a few decades since I read it, but I remember him kind of sensationalizing the whole thing. Their complaint was that their M16s weren't dropping guys like the Delta operator with the M14 sniper rifle, and of course no one ever stopped to think that maybe his shot placement was a tad bit better. Not that they could have examined the bodies or anything, but Delta are the absolute best shooters in the world to begin with, and this was the dude they picked to be their sniper. I imagine the guy was a veritable rock star when it came to shot placement.

Yaw is one thing... but frag and energy dump are another. I loaded a 77 OTM to approximately the speed of sound and it yawed, didn't frag, and penetrated deep enough that I lost the bullet. In other words, yaw itself doesn't translate into much more cavity or energy dump.

I honestly don't know if the OTMs are intended to frag or not. It's pretty much just an FMJ with its jacket on backwards so my guess is likely not.

I'd be much more comfy with a Bonded Gold Dot. The penetrator apparently works good in some specific circumstances, but I've never realized it. I shot it in auto glass against a bunch of other non-bonded bullets. None of them were worth a crap.

Naturally Gold Dots would be preferable, price being equal, but before things went crazy God Dots were like a buck a round and M855 was a little over a quarter a round. It was originally designed to penetrate Soviet helmets, so it can go through metal barriers that FMJ like M193 cannot.

M855 is a rugged round. But Iraqgunz used to get the warning notices electronically on Lake City production issues. And he told me you'd be surprised at how many issues there are with our Mil ordnance. (More American Mediocrity in motion)

Certainly doesn't surprise me, but I've had good luck with it. Anything bought for defense or stockpiling should have good quality components and be sealed. Other options close to that price have lesser quality primers and powder, and they load them weak to save money. Obviously a boutique manufacturer like Black Hills is probably better in the QC department, but within the same price range I've found M855 to be a very viable option.

I look at M855 like a decent back up stash round. Does nothing particularly well, but ANY reliable rifle ammo is valuable and appreciated.

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[ABNAK]

I look at M855 like a decent back up stash round. Does nothing particularly well, but ANY reliable rifle ammo is valuable and appreciated.

My sentiments also. I have quite a bit of it and I use it for plinking or zeroing for other, much better and thus more expensive 62gr loads (M855 to get on paper, then XXX to fine-tune the zero).

[SteyrAUG]

It's been a few decades since I read it, but I remember him kind of sensationalizing the whole thing. Their complaint was that their M16s weren't dropping guys like the Delta operator with the M14 sniper rifle, and of course no one ever stopped to think that maybe his shot placement was a tad bit better. Not that they could have examined the bodies or anything, but Delta are the absolute best shooters in the world to begin with, and this was the dude they picked to be their sniper. I imagine the guy was a veritable rock star when it came to shot placement.

I suspect it's more an issue of us using a round designed for a Soviet enemy we anticipated might be wearing body armor on the battlefield but instead we ended up shooting naked Africans. So in many, many cases the round simply clean holed through them and they continued to shoot at you. The vast majority died later after a magazine or two of returned fire. The guys who found bone or got good hits on internals got better results.

That said, I always love flight time at 500 yards and beyond.

[mack7.62]

The question is will it penetrate SAPI and ESAPI.

[ABNAK]

The question is how well does it penetrate a ESAPI.

I don't think it does. ESAPI is rated for anything short of .300 WinMag (IIRC).

Ahh, I think I get the jib of your jive. M995 might do it but good luck finding any. I don't even think .mil types play with it. Maybe SMU folks but I don't think it's common.

[mack7.62]

OK looking at the standards ESAPI is up to revision J and is rated to stop 3 rounds of M995 AP. I am starting to think the A zone on a IPSC target should be scored as a miss,

[okie]

I suspect it's more an issue of us using a round designed for a Soviet enemy we anticipated might be wearing body armor on the battlefield but instead we ended up shooting naked Africans. So in many, many cases the round simply clean holed through them and they continued to shoot at you. The vast majority died later after a magazine or two of returned fire. The guys who found bone or got good hits on internals got better results.

That said, I always love flight time at 500 yards and beyond.

That was the hypothesis put forward by someone the author may or may not have interviewed, but there are problems with it. The main problem is not one single body was recovered to show that the M855 had failed in even one single case. Neither was any body recovered from the Delta sniper's targets to show that his rounds were any more lethal, irrespective of shot placement. The Occam's explanation in this case is that the Delta sniper was making solid A zone hits, vs. the rangers with their iron sighted M16s. I'm not saying Rangers are bad shots by any means, but we're talking semi pro vs. the literal best of the best in terms of combat marksmanship.

People also have faulty ideas about how 223 behaves in human targets. In muscular tissue, the results are far less dramatic than say a head shot for example. So whether the bullet tumbles and frags or not isn't as massive of a determining factor as most people assume. That is, if it strikes an inelastic tissue like the brain, whether it tumbles or not is pretty much irrelevant. Whether it makes a small hole through someone's head or takes half their head off is irrelevant in most cases; either way, that person is likely out of the fight.

Likewise, when you're talking about the extremely elastic, muscular tissues of the A zone and its organs, it's also somewhat irrelevant whether it tumbles or not. A miss is still a miss. If the bullet fails to directly strike an organ or major vessel, the chances of a successful stop are probably remote. The main thing people fail to appreciate is that humans aren't solid like a block of gel. We're made up of all kinds of little bags all contained in one big bag, and those little bags are extremely tough and can move around a lot. If it fragments, there's always the chance that one of the fragments will pierce a major vessel, but that's not always going to produce results, and even more seldom will they be immediate. The main problem with the fragment strategy of bullet design is that things tend to follow the path of least resistance, which is around organs via the intersecting tissue planes. You always hear about how bullets and fragments of bullets that entered a shoulder end up found in someone's hip, and the assumption is that they travel in a straight line through all that tissue. When in reality they simply skate around gliding through the body in the spaces between organs.

There are always outliers, but for the most part, if you don't directly strike a vital organ or major vessel your target is not going down. He may have a nasty gaping cavity somewhere in him that's going to be irreparable and cause him to bleed out on the operating table hours later, but that's not going to prevent him from shooting back at you. And in the vast, vast majority of cases, it wouldn't have mattered what you shot him with (range notwithstanding). Whether it was 9mm or the nastiest 7.62 hollow point you could find, the basic equation is highly unlikely to change. Good hits to the A zone are highly likely to succeed, and misplaced shots are highly likely to fail. The only reasonable way a bullet itself can be said to have failed is if it either doesn't penetrate deeply enough, or if it veers off course because it doesn't have enough energy to power through bone and tissue planes in a straight line.