Rob, your speculation about the SAS’s use of shotguns and shotgun ammunition based on google research is just as far out of your lane as it is mine, and adds pretty much zero value to this discussion.Originally Posted by RevolverRob
I took a couple of undergrad science classes and I enjoy watching Nova, maybe I can come speak to one of your classes or labs.
In some guns.
There's no hard and fast rule on that because it's too inconsistent from weapon to weapon for anyone to count on.
If that was the case Vang Comp wouldn't have a barrel treatment...they'd be installing chokes in guns.
Constricting buckshot forces pellets closer together. It is the contact between pellets that causes them to flat-spot the most and causes the billiard-ball effect that leads to spread.
3/15/2016
I'm gonna flip the script.
Let's say the SAS Officer in question was using Flitecontrol buckshot - did all the ISIS guys die because they found out what was loaded in the gun and had heard Flitecontrol is the awesomest shit ever? Or did they die, because said SAS Officer ran his gun like a fucking champ and skull shot 5 dudes in 7 seconds?
Let us remember that there are a lot of dead baddies who were killed with buckshot long before Federal Cartridge Company existed, let alone before Flitecontrol existed. It's almost like buckshot is really effective at close range if you aim the shotgun.
We've known for decades (centuries?) that buckshot works best if it can be held in a fairly tight pattern in general. We used to do that by using chokes, then Hans Vang came along and taught us other ways of doing it (though to be fair, Hans really pioneered those techniques on martial weapons, backboring was done for decades on high-end sporting guns prior to that). Then the choke wad came along and allowed us to accomplish the same thing in most guns, without needing to work on them. That awesome and FC is awesome because it's the ammo that lets us do that.
But there are multiple ways to skull shoot terrorists, just like there are multiple ways to improve the pattern on scatterguns used for martial purposes.
Tangent - I've been thinking about this for awhile. I'm totally on board, all shotguns are snowflakes and do their own thing. The question I've been thinking about is...why?
I guess what I'm saying is, I don't have a good grasp on why two guns, made on the same assembly, one right after another, will shoot totally different with the same ammunition?
I know we encounter that with pistols from time to time, but not nearly to the same degree. If I picked a dozen Glocks out of a bag and we shot them, pretty much every one of them would deposit bullets on target pretty damn close to another +/- a few mm. But a dozen Benellis or Remingtons or whatever won't pattern the same.
I know you've spent a while working and thinking about shotguns TC - any ideas?
Gas guns are where low recoil loads shine in auto loaders. I have a Benelli M1 Super 90 with an 18 inch barrel, which is fairly reliable with the Federal low recoil offerings in slugs and buck, somewhat so with target loads. My Avatar picture is me at Blackwater in the late 90s with my issued M1 Super 90 Entry gun with a 14 inch barrel. Not duty reliable with our standard Federal LE load, less so with target loads, so I bought classic high brass fodder for it. Training days made for a sore shoulder. I remember one particularly long one where I shot 125 full power slugs. I was much younger then! Ran like a champ, and I shot thousands of rounds through that gun (it was issued to me for eleven years. We traded it in on some 1301s just before I retired. Told our dealer I wanted it. My form 4 came back today, one full year later. Baby comes home Friday)
The 1301s I got for the team eat everything from light trap loads to the heaviest slugs, as does my personal one. The M4 entry models we tested were same same. I have no concerns light loads in gas guns
Very much this. And shot hardness also plays a role. The softer the shot the more dispersion for a given constriction in a given shotgun. I have used a Modified choke tube in the same gun to shoot patterns anywhere from cylinder to improved modified just by varying the shot hardness.
When I used my 1014 in phantom fury I had plenty of buckshot and limited slugs due to supply. This was in the fall of 04 and life was pretty basic. Sleeping in/on captured buildings etc. We were moving faster than food and water at times.
Buckshot worked well if the pellets hit center mass. The farther away I was the worse buckshot performed. Slugs worked as well at 5 yards as 125 which was my longest shot and I won a bet with it.
Ours had fixed mod chokes. I wish I had flight control buck. I felt there were several times at 2-30 yards that I had to shoot again because of a marginal hit which sucks with a low capacity weapon.
With my experience hunting deer now and seeing the results vs combat I am perfectly comfortable shooting at a large animal if the pattern stays in the chest cavity. Flight control can do at 50 what standard buck can do at 25 with no negatives up close.
The snowflakeyness of shotguns can be attributed to many things...but QC in production of the barrels and in the ammo is the biggest thing.
If you buy a Beretta 1301 you are buying from a company that is obsessively exact in the way they manufacture shotgun barrels because making very good shotguns is how they make most of their money. They go through a number of QC steps and use state of the art machining processes to make sure their barrels exist within fairly tight tolerances.
That ain't happening on an 870 Express barrel.
I might be misremembering the exact numbers, but the barrel on a 12 gauge shotgun can be within the industry standards with a variation of something like between .70" and .74" (Someone correct me if I'm wrong) That's just at the muzzle, not counting the variations possible in the internal geometry of the barrel. (Forcing cone, choke, etc) Hell, even the 2 3/4" shell isn't really 2 3/4" all the time. That's more a general description than an accurate measurement of shell length.
Even with the excellent QC that a company like Beretta uses, Briley makes a good living selling barrel-length chokes to install in their guns to get even more pattern precision for obsessive clay busting.
Then there's the ammo itself. How round are the pellets? How much quality control is dedicated to making the pellets perfectly weighted and perfectly round? How round do they stay through the firing process? How consistent is the manufacture of the shell and its components from lot to lot?
One of the reasons I'm a fan of Federal Flight Control is that Federal seems to have the best quality control of any ammunition manufacturer at the moment. I've had exactly one FFC shell that was defective and it was obviously defective with the rim mangled horribly. Can't say that about the scores of Remington, Winchester, or S&B shells I've bought...although S&B has done pretty well in terms of go-bang. Though I think their felt wads are actually causing me sinus problems if I'm in too long of a class shooting them.
So it really boils down to the fact that shotgun barrels as made by most manufacturers are holding tolerances that probably aren't too far off from tolerances common to the early industrial revolution and ammunition is probably not too far off in many cases. Two 870's can be assembled one right after another, but there's nothing saying that the barrels installed on those guns at the factory were made at anything approaching the same time. It's fairly common for manufacturers to run a large batch of parts at a particular time storing them up for future completed products because it's more economical to make a bunch of part X when the machines are set up for it. Those parts get stored in a bin, it gets a bar code, and it gets stored until needed.
Then that bin gets drawn from for various assembly needs and may be only partially used. Then the bin gets pulled out and refilled with more of the same part because we're talking about steel, here, so it doesn't go bad on the shelf like milk. So in the same bin you can have two barrels next to each other that were manufactured 90 or more days apart on different machines with different tooling, inspected by completely different people on completely different shifts and assembled by somebody who somewhat haphazardly assembles the two guns without noticing that the first barrel's bore isn't even drilled straight.
Last edited by TCinVA; 09-17-2019 at 06:38 PM.
3/15/2016
The big takeaway I get from this is breachers should be running a full size semi with a dot sight instead of a pistol gripped shorty like many do. Bill Blowers has preached this for a while and there is a lot of truth to it if your crew uses shotguns for breaching...
I wouldn't want to breach with a full sized auto and then enter with that gun as my primary. Sometimes you need multiple shots for locks and hinges.
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