Test on Armour
 

This has probably come up before:

http://www.myarmoury.com/talk/viewto...t=11131#112880

What I mean to highlight here is the test on the jacks. It appears that the acuteness of the point matters less than the sharpness of the edges behind them. Brokes further examination, certainly.

M.

Re: Test on Armour
 

It is one of the better back yard tests. Even the mail is better than most.

Re: Test on Armour
 

What I've always wondered with these armor tests is why they don't put the armor on some hogs and then see what the weapons do. Wouldn't that be more effective than sitting it against a block of wood?

Re: Test on Armour
 

Part way through that thread, the author explains why he didn't use pork as a flesh substitute in these tests (expensive and messy), though apparently he's used it in the past. I can only imagine that actually using live pigs would be worse.

Re: Test on Armour
 

Well, dogs are pretty cheap. Didn't ancient people sometimes armor dogs? We could at least get some useful information that way.

Re: Test on Armour
 

Goats are apparently the closest human analogue for these sorts of tests. You don't need a corpse if you just want to measure flesh injury. Ballistics gel is well accepted for penetration and ballistics clay is used for blunt trauma. Those materials produce consistent and reproducable results. If you want to use corpses then you would need to test a large number of them and average the results.

Re: Test on Armour
 

Ballistics gel and clay produce consistent results, but how well do those results translate over to living tissue? I get the impression that they're mostly useful for comparing between similar impactors, less useful for telling what those would do against a person.

Re: Test on Armour
 

Human tissue is variable enough that even testing on a corpse won't necessarily help, there's a bit difference between a path that hits a bone and a path that doesn't.

Re: Test on Armour
 

If you're just kind of randomly shooting at various parts of a body, sure. I would hope that people doing testing are being a little more consistent in their target choice, because hitting armor in different places or different angles also makes a big difference.

Ummm . . .
 

The majority of the people on this planet are NOT RP gamers. If any such gamers or, simply, history buffs were to conduct such experiments on living animals there would be h-e-double asterisks to pay.

I suggest that this would not be a good idea. Note how there is a wave of revulsion when, for example, the US government tests various weapons and/or body armor on living animals for what seem to be much more justifiable purposes than historical research.