I’ve never been hit in armor and have not personally witnessed it. Yes, I’ve seen those tests with a clay torso behind armor, but I have no idea how to interpret those results.
That being said, via first hand accounts and/or academic/professional studies, what are the effects on the human body when:
Hit by 9mm/.40/.45 in soft armor in which the armor stops the round from penetrating
Hit by 9mm/.40/.45 in hard armor of any type
Hit by 5.56/5.45 in ceramic stand-alone plates
Hit by 5.56/5.45 in ceramic ICW plates + kevlar/dyneema/whatever backing
Hit by 5.56/5.45 in AR500 (or similar very hard metal) stand-alone plates - not interested in the spall nor splash effects right now, assume it’s all caught in rhinolining or kevlar or whatever.
Hit by 7.62x51/7.62x54R/.30-06 in ceramic stand-alone plates
Hit by 7.62x51/7.62x54R/.30-06 in ceramic ICW plates + kevlar/dyneema/whatever backing
Hit by 7.62x51/7.62x54R/.30-06 in AR500 (or similar very hard metal) stand-alone plates - not interested in the spall nor splash effects right now, assume it’s all caught in rhinolining or kevlar or whatever.
I’ve heard stories, in no particular order, of:
Even with hard ICW plates, getting hit breaks ribs, causes bruising, and knocks you on your ass
With plates, it’ll be a thud but you probably won’t be knocked over unless you were already unbalanced
Being hit in the soft armor with a pistol will cause internal bleeding and mess up your organs
Etc.
Can someone set me straight on this?
(Mods, if this is the wrong place for this post, please move it accordingly. I couldn’t figure out the best place to put it.)
Matt Davis from Armor Express has done several self shoots to demonstrate the effectiveness of their vests, and his father did many of them before him.
Interesting, this video in that post (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaS_2l8nGdg) shows a 7.62x51mm at about 1 yard range and barely putting the guy off-balance, and that was when he was standing on one leg.
Physics dictates that it won’t knock you over unless you’re very off balance to begin with. For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction… so unless firing the gun (lets pretend no brake, bolt action, nothing to reduce recoil) unprepared will knock you over, getting hit by it won’t knock you over. Mythbusters did some testing shooting a pig hanging from a hook that it had almost fallen off of, and couldn’t get it to come of with 12 gauge loads. I forget whether full auto did the trick or not.
When you speak of an AR500 plate, I’m assuming we’re talking about a plate thick enough that the back side won’t deform. In that case, with a sizable plate and a round no larger than you’re talking about, I wouldn’t expect significant injury. The plate simply spreads the energy out too far - I know it’s a longer impulse, but you won’t break ribs if you put the rifle against your chest and fire it either.
When it comes to items intended to be body armor, weight is significant so the back can be expected to deform. In that case, I would expect some localized injuries, depending on what you’re getting hit with and the armor you have on it will vary.
In any of these cases, your reaction to being shot may involve you ending up on the ground. That’s different than the bullet knocking you over. If anything, body armor makes it more likely that you’ll be knocked over, as it will result in more of the bullet’s momentum being transferred to you (vs potentially going through, not transferring all of it’s energy).
I’ve personally witnessed dudes that exhibited extreme differences in reaction to getting hit in the plate with 7.62x39mm (most likely).
Some dropped to the ground, and then scrambled to cover, some didn’t know that they had actually been hit until post return at which point they found pieces of projectile sticking in their plate/armor carrier.
The biggest difference in reaction was the action at the time of incident.
The ones that were standing around, not actively fighting, tended to drop.
Those that were probably fighting at the time of incident didn’t realize that they were “hit”. (Hard to tell since they didn’t really know when it happened).
Helmet hits (including non-blood events) tended to drop the subject. Those that didn’t involve actual head injury (blood loss) tended to recover quickly.
Remember the basic physics of it and Newton’s Third Law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
The impact would feel similar to what you feel when firing the gun. If you’re balance was off far enough, that shove might finish you off and knock you over, but it take a 7.62 rifle, stand on one leg, and shoot. Did it knock you over? Probably not, or just slightly.
Right, the total energy of the bullet impact will always be less than the recoil of a bare muzzle bolt gun firing the round. But the way that energy is used is different.
Lots of variables in there to be sure, but the end result is, it would feel like a good thump (similar to what it feels like when firing a 7.62 bolt gun) and that’s about it as the basic physics states. I have no plans or interest to test that out myself, but that vid for example seems very much in line with what you’d expect.
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.
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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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.
From a physics standpoint, the key factor is momentum.
A 7.62 round, for example, has significant kinetic energy (KE, 1/2mv2), but it has an insignificant Momentum (mv) - 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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
That’s too bad. You have a scientific approach to things that would be interesting!