this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2025
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There's a lot of factors, shape speed and deformation are all factors. Penetration and energy transfer are also at odds with each other in general. Gun manufacturers have this problem because speed is more or less capped by a practical barrel length, a rail gun can (theoretically) achieve enough speed that either factors start to become less relevant.
Somewhat pedantical quibble, really just because I find it interesting: It's not exactly limited by barrel length. We can make faster burning, higher powered propellants, which you can get the full energy out of with a shorter barrel. The reason we don't is because that means you have a higher pressure inside the chamber and, even if your gun doesn't explode, you face more erosion from use. Your metallurgy ends up being the limiting factor, as it's all about how strong you can make your chamber. I just think it's cool because guns are a great example of how inter-related technologies are and how everything depends on everything else. Take a design for a machinegun back to the Napoleonic era and it will be worthless because without smokeless powder it will jam and clog after a couple rounds. Take back a formula for smokeless powder and it will be worthless because you don't know how to make brass cartridges. Try to make brass cartridges and you'll find you lack the precision tooling, and so on.
Pure theory, likely never ever going to be real, but could a bullet move so fast that it goes through someone without even damaging them?
Any matter going through you with that much mass is going to cause damage no matter how fast it goes. Billions of particles called neutrinos are moving through you right now as you read this but they are around 100,000,000,000,000x less massive than a hydrogen atom
No, but it travels fast enough it would disintegrate and you could argue the resulting fireball would be what actually damaged the target.
Relevant XKCD.
Not really applicable but think there could be a small chance it would quantum tunnel through the person but that's such miniscule chance.
Only in anime.
Define damage. Can it pass through the middle of organs? Sure, if it hits just right. But that's not so much a question of speed.
You'd need a pin needle shape to have a chance of piercing an organ without causing lasting damage, but it will probably break on impact
That is simply not true. All you have to do is design your projectile in shape, construction and materials so the kinetic energy gets properly used to cause damage to the target.
A tiny 40 grain .204 Ruger bullet with the insane muzzle velocity of 4100 fps will absolutely explode a watermelon if you use a rapidly expanding projectile such as a ballistic tipped varmint round.
As a matter of fact, the problem you can recounted with projectiles that go too fast is that they will over expand and under penetrate depending on the nature of the target. It isn't a simple problem, the are many different types of dynamics that you can get depending on the nature of the projectile, velocity and target.
I get the feeling the 4 million grain Revolving Peasant Gun with the velocity of 1% the speed of light will have the desired effect on any target.
What makes you say that?
Well I'm being tongue in cheek, but I don't see how a peasant travelling at a significant fraction of the speed of light will not obliterate anything he hits (along with himself)
The peasant rail gun doesn't fire peasents, it fires a single "small object" using peasant propulsion. In D&D5e, a small object is anything that fits into a ~60cm cube.
Other comments were discussing bullet shape, but I think if you fire something the mass and size (!) of, idk, a pumpkin or even a nightstand, shape isn't that important.
I know, I was playing on the joke. Not obvious enough apparently.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/
I actually had that in mind, hence why I kept it limited to 1% 😂
This is simply true, you do lose potential energy transfer if the bullet exits, that's how it can exit, that's just not usually the point of a bullet, and generally speaking making exit wounds is considered a positive.
Now if you want to design a bullet that explodes inside a wound causing mass trauma and an incredibly difficult surgery to repair it is a problem, but surely no one would ever deliberately design a weapon to do that! /S
Fun Fact: the .50 cal MGs the Soviets supplied to the Vietnamese during the American invasion usually had enough penetrative power to go through the M113 APC's aluminum hull...
Once. And then it would bounce around inside.
I don't see the point you're trying to make here. You sound like you're trying to disprove my point that more velocity won't necessarily equate to overpenetration and "penciling through" with minimal damage but you all you did is explain that overpenetration means unused kinetic energy. Which is usually true depending on the situation but doesn't disprove what I said.
They also said that exit wounds can have benefits, though they didn’t get into it nearly enough. I’m imagining that two wounds, especially on opposite side of a person, are going to be a lot harder to deal with and the increase blood loss potential while also distracting anyone trying to help them has a lot of benefits.
Also I say benefits, but yuck.
you just have to make the gun and projectile bigger. fire a 100kg chunk of iron.