ThirtyWorse

I was brought to this topic by google trying to figure out if the suppressors for weapons worked yet, I was baffled by all of the contradictory information here. SO: Hello. I am an apprentice gunsmith and have built suppressors for a variety of calibers. Perhaps I can help put this to bed. Firstly, most common 45ACP loads are going to be "subsonic". The audible characteristics of a round flying downrange varies wildly not just by its speed, but its size, shape, and especially the weather. The speed of sound changes depending on environmental factors such as humidity and temperature, it is not an absolute variable like the speed of light. The speed of sound in air can fluctuate as much as 100 feet per second over the course of a day, which is about the same range as your most common 45ACP loads. "SD" Rounds are pretty much purely fiction. There are special light loads that are used for niche circumstances, but by and large when a suppressor is being used it's just being used with standard loads. The purpose of a suppressor is not to completely silence a weapon, in fact there are very few suppressors that can even do that. The absolute best you're generally going to hope for is a 50% reduction for a rifle, less for a carbine with a shorter barrel, since the purpose of a suppressor is to give an additional space for the gasses that are escaping from the barrel to slow and cool before leaving. It is the pressure of this gas, often (but not always) perceived as muzzle flash, that creates a fairly large pressure wave as it suddenly expands out into the lower pressure atmosphere. This is a very rough analogy but imagine it like this: You are at a lake, and have two stones. Simply dropping one into the water is going to make quite a splash, but if you attached a parachute to the other one it would be much slower and hit the water with much less energy, making less of a splash. The stone hitting the water is what happens to the air when the gas leaves the barrel. The suppressor is the parachute. In my personal experience, the only two weapons I have ever audibly "silenced" the muzzle report from were a Ruger MkII with a comically large suppressor (think car oil filter size) and a 22LR bolt action rifle with a suppressor specifically designed for that particular weapon based on caliber and barrel length. In the case of the MkII you could still hear the action quite clearly and a slight short hiss from the small amount of gas escaping from the action itself, but in the case of the bolt-action all you could really hear was the bolt cycling and the firing pin hitting the casing. Of course, you can use light loads with a suppressor to get more of an effect, but it harshly affects the ballistics, as it would in any case. A suppressor will only increase accuracy (and marginally at that) depending on how it is built. Even though the underlaying principle is always the same, there are a few different ways to build them. Some are basically barrel extensions with vents that lead to the baffles, which is typically how integrated suppressors work. Most do not touch the bullet in any way once it leaves the barrel proper, it just flies through the baffles and continues on its merry way. I hope that helps clear things up, then again it's 0230 and I should have been in bed a while ago so who knows maybe I just made it worse. TLDR: Rifles with suppressors are still loud as hell, the speed of sound varies enough so a subsonic 45ACP fired at night can be supersonic fired the following noon.