ammunitionA coworker pointed me toward these, bullets with integral compensator vents drilled into them. The company’s promotional literature suggests that the vents will allow expanding gasses to lubricate the bullet as it travels down the barrel. Additionally, the vents are supposed to reduce recoil, muzzle flash, and smoke, all while improving velocity.
These claims seem contradictory to my layperson’s eye. Can anyone provide an expert’s opinion as to what they believe will actually happen?
Just to build the body of knowledge around this: I asked an expert aquaintance of mine, and he pointed me to his comment on the very blog post I linked:
My lab works with high speed flows and we’ve taken a whole lot of shadowgraph videos of gunshots, and I totally agree that there’s some interesting dynamics occuring at the interface right when the bullet has left the muzzle.
On that note, however, I can say without a shred of doubt in my mind that these CompBullets are snake oil. The time scales involved are insanely short for the dynamics that would have to occur for them to do anything… microseconds!
Long after (relatively speaking) the bullet leaves the barrel, there is still significant pressure inside the barrel, which leads to a compressible jet out the muzzle. Compensators revector this jet to produce reaction forces that help to combat muzzle movement, and act over the period of milliseconds! Several orders of magnitude longer than this bullet ever could.
Also, I have a feeling that the increased velocities they see with these bullets come from the fact that they are solid copper, which is less than half as dense as lead!
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