Many hollowpoints tend to penetrate further after going through heavy clothing, because their hollowpoint cavities fill with clothing fibers, and the bullets either under-expand, or fail to expand at all. Surprisingly, adding FBI-standard Heavy Clothing in front of the gelatin doesn’t help the HST Micro to reach deeper. That’s not a problem for most users, but Federal needed an option for those customers who placed a premium on penetration over expansion. 38 Special HST is an outstanding bullet–one of the very best on the market–but its very large expansion prohibits it from getting deeper than 12 inches in calibrated gelatin. This is unsurprising, considering the HST Micro bullet was designed to favor large expansion over deep penetration. 38 Special +P HST Micro, gets to (exactly) 12 inches in bare, calibrated gelatin, but the sizable expansion of the HST bullet (almost 1.7 times the original diameter, in bare gelatin) prevents it from going any deeper. 38 Special product that could do that reliably. While the FBI’s standards are clearly designed to address law enforcement requirements, and a person could argue that 12 inches of ballistic gelatin penetration is an unnecessarily high bar for the typical snubby revolver engagement, there’s a number of folks who are so comfortable with the FBI’s 12-inch standard, they’re hesitant to carry a load that won’t meet it, regardless of mission. The 12-inch standard was important to them, because it represents the minimum acceptable penetration depth for a law enforcement duty round, according to the FBI’s protocol for testing ammunition. To do that with reliability, they needed a different projectile. It’s a good bullet, but it doesn’t go 12 inches with expansion. Federal introduced the 120+P Punch in 2020 to compete in the market segment that was being served with loads like the Sig Sauer V-Crown. 38 caliber bullet that would both reliably expand, and still penetrate to distances of at least 12 inches in bare, calibrated ballistic gelatin, and gelatin covered in clothing. Based on the success of their new bullet design, they felt it was now possible to push the accepted bounds of. 38 Special loads in these products, particularly the HST, but their work on another project opened up some new opportunities to address the delicate balance between penetration and expansion in a cartridge like the. While these two bullets are very different in their design, materials, construction, cost, and target market, they’ve been well received by shooters.įederal already had good. 38 Special +P HST Micro in 2017, and the 120 grain. 38 Special quite a bit, releasing new loads for their Personal Defense line such as the 130 grain. In the past several years, we’ve seen them tinkering with the old. The engineers at Federal are smart guys though, and always eager to tackle unique challenges like this. Conversely, the ones that can be relied upon to penetrate deeply, don’t tend to expand. 38 Special loads which expand well, don’t tend to penetrate very deeply in industry-standard test mediums. To date, the tradeoffs associated with these choices have dictated that most of the. Bullet weights, materials, designs, hardness, and velocities all have to be carefully tailored to obtain the best performance, particularly from a smaller gun. 38 Special doesn’t give ammunition companies a whole lot to work with, they have to make very deliberate choices to eke out the best performance from this cartridge. 38 Special doesn’t have a surplus of energy that it can afford to lose, and when you shoot it in the small guns, it can lose just enough energy to have a dramatic effect on terminal performance.īecause the. As a moderate energy level cartridge, the. 38 Special ammunition for snubby revolvers here in these pages, and described the challenges involved with trying to make the most special of revolver cartridges perform from abbreviated barrels, which rob velocity and energy from the bullet. We recently discussed the ins and outs of.
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