Originally posted by theSea:
I'm not a gun-tech expert so excuse me if I have some of my rounds and loads a bit off the mark. I am a trained EMT so I've learned a bit about what will kill you and how long it takes. Fortunately, all an EMT has to do is keep you alive long enough for a Paramedic to arrive
Most of my learning is at the other end of the spectrum. I have emergency combat first aid (lifesaver-ish) training, but I learned a lot more about how to inflict injury than to repair/treat it.
1) 1 hit 1 kill with a pistol is hard to do unless you're using some behemoth like Dirty Harry. Pistol bullets don't carry an awful lot of kinetic energy. The short muzzel length and low projectile weight that essentially *mean* pistol also mean that you're not going to be packing a lot of stopping power unless the gun and ammo are specifically beefed up to do it.
That's part of the picture. Part of the picture is how much tissue damage, hydrostatic shock/pressure you can inflict, and the efficiency of the transfer of kinetic energy, which is a larger factor than most people probably suspect.
But to get that kind of power you need a big bullet with a lot of powder pushing it - this is not normally the case with a pistol round. Sure your .357 magnum or Colt Desert Eagle are going to do this - but then you have a big heavy gun with big heavy bullets and recoil out the waz.
A Colt M1911A1 in .45 ACP isn't a *huge* gun (no desert eagle) but with the right load, it'll leave an exit wound the size of my fist. The furrow it blows through what's in the middle looks like a nasty little cone of sorts.
A lot has to do with your load. Caliber matters, but the load type probably matters as much.
Head or torso hits are going to be very deadly with that type of round. Obviously, if you're looking for the quick kill you want to be putting enough kinetic energy on the victim to cause golfball or baseball sized exit wounds...
Which most pistols can manage with non-standard (by our standards) loads. Dum-dum, hollowpoint, explosive, or other rounds or oddballs like the Glaser can put enough damage onto your target to cause that kind of impact. Also, using softer metals or fragmenting designs can increase the effects. Most of this is at the cost of penetration, however.
this works by imparting so much kinetic energy at impact that a hydrostatic pressure wave forms ahead of the bullet - producing much, much more trauma than the actual round.
Fragmentation, tumbling, having a round that deforms more easily - these aren't all *power* related. Power is one way to get more damage, efficiency of energy transfer or various shot/fragmenting designs is another.
Under more normal pistol conditions (6mm to 9mm round)- head shots in anything other than 'execution mode' are tough for the average pistoleer to make,
Intentionally.
But they do happen by accident.
And in military conflicts, you see them more often as people tend to fight from covered positions, so hits tend to hit things like your head. (Hands and arms and feet tend to get hit a bunch too).
and anything besides a center hit will get you a knock down but not an instant fatality. Skull fractures and brain penetrations kill - but again, not instantly.
But many of these hits may partially impair you - make your vision blurry, cost you an eye, make breathing difficult, without rendering you hors-de-combat.
And brain hits *can* kill you instantly, in some cases (instantly meaning within a moment or two). There are a lot of data points from WW1 through the later half of the 20th century that suggest that head hits and other kinds of wounds do transpire in those kind of settings. It is a bit much after the fact to sort out who died 'right then' and who died for not getting aide, but when someone says his body dropped beside him, he stopped to help him, and he was dead, they might have been wrong, but we'll never really know exactly if he was dead or just looked that way to an inexpert viewer.
Torso shots are also problematic in that you've basically got to sever a major blood vessel to stop someone cold with a pistol round.
I believe this is why the SAS and Canadian JTF2 have a 'rapid fire' technique that involves emptying a whole magazine rapidly into different areas on a target to score the quick kill for guys like bomb-triggermen and such instead of the old double tap.
A shot through the spine might not kill you outright, but it will put you down and out. Or at least the part of you beyond that point....
You don't have that huge hydrostatic pressure wave shredding tissue all over the place - chances are that the bullet is going to go through (with an exit wound around the size of the entry wound)
This is the result of using copper jacketed bullets in part and using the high muzzle velocity of the 9mm. 9mm are renowned for overpenetration in typical North American urban conditions. They go through walls far easier than some larger rounds. High muzzle velocity and a jacketed round tends to lead to shoot-through.
But a 9mm with a soft lead or hollowtip bullet is going to do a lot more damage. Load it a bit lighter in the powder department and you may actually get a more damaging round, less prone to fire-through and collateral damage.
or hit something like a rib and stop. Either way you've got a good sized hole pushed through your victim, but ultimately something not much worse than an arrow wound.
I concur that this is generally the effect from modern 9mm pistol ammunition.
So you're looking for a heart hit or a major blood vessel that's going to drop the target's cranial blood pressure hard and fast. Anything else in the torso will kill eventually - but in the meantime your target is probably going to be concious, pissed and shooting back.
Here's where we get to my problem with MT:
He's going to shoot back unimpaired in any fashion. In CT, your stats drop off. In MT, they don't. In MT, shots in the limbs don't affect firing or movement. A shot in the belly doesn't slow you down. A shot in the spine won't stop you moving. This is one of the reasons I want some better wounding effects.
2) The human body is very resilient - for an hour or so. If you're in better shape you get a bit more time, and there's no guarentee that you're going to be FUNCTIONING - but most things (trauma wise that is) that don't kill you instantly take about an hour as the body tries to compensate for the nasty things you've done to it. Agressive, TL7 or TL8 medical intervention within that 'golden hour' can make a huge difference unless something irreversable (like a shredded heart or severed aorta) has been done.
Yep. But its the cases where this kind of damage is done I'm talking about, and in CT it was pretty much impossible to do. With MT, you *can* do it, but if you don't outright kill or the guy or knock him out, you aren't likely to impair him at all. Both systems have a weakness, IMO.
Interesting side note: I've seen some pretty convincing arguments made that the murder rate is down in the US over the last ten years because EMS is getting very good at saving gunshot victims. The *attempted* murder rate is not down.
Statistics is like a bikini - what it reveals is interesting, what it conceals is more interesting yet.
3) As has been noted, trauma and wounding are highly variable events. Physical condition can make a big difference - a strong cardiovascular system can keep your brain alive in marginal situations where an out of shape person would have died.
There is a lot of psychology involved as well. if a patient thinks he is going to die he is much more likely to do so. Someone whose only exposure to gunplay is via TV is likely to expect to go down and stay down from a single hit - unless he thinks he's Jason Voorhees. There are people that will faint at the sight of blood - theirs or anyone else's - so I'm sure that there are also people who will go into arrest from any gunshot hit. Possibly from a
perceived gunshot hit - but that's the nature of the matrix
Having studied this on and off for years, I think psychology plays a large and hard to quantify part in this. I've heard of or seen people cringe from slight wounds and become functionally useless, yet we all know of people or at least stories of people who have kept on functioning despite ridiculous amounts of damage. I know of people who freeze, or panic, in a crisis - I tend to react. Psychology plays a big role in human combat, but it is a bugaboo to represent fairly in a game.
One of the cases of a stupid wound killing someone - there is a case where a guy got hit in the hand by a .50 BMG. He died. I think he died instantly, or at least pretty much collapsed at the time. From my understanding, he died from the shock of the wound, it might have been a cardiac arrest. The .50 BMG has a stupid amount of kinetic energy, and it'd just go right through the hand, probably blow a big whopping helluva hole in it. But that probably wouldn't kill most people. But this case, the fellow dropped apparently stone dead.
So... I don't see that it's necessary to use a combat system that does anything more than let you know if the guy is still coming after a hit - dead, unconcious, knocked flat - whatever. You can work the details out after - you just need to know if he's 'mission killed' or not. After the fight you can figure out whether it's worth while to start CPR.
Depends on your taste. I expect to see the following states represented:
Fine
Impaired Performance
- injured limbs
- injured spine
- injured sensory organs
- concussion, etc.
Hors De Combat (Unconcious, Incoherent, etc)
Actually Dead
CT makes it hard to get to the last one (harder than it should be perhaps) and MT glosses over the second. A blend of both would give the best of both worlds.
Plus, as a GM, I like to be able to tell my player he was shot in the unarmoured arm and he now can't use it for firing his gauss pistol while hanging from the rapelling rope with the other hand and that he drops the gauss pistol. Sure I can make this up, but I prefer to have some tables and a system that makes it a bit automated so I don't have to feel each wound is a personal judgement....
