.50 caliber rifles. At some point we need to have a serious talk about this.

[bazbake 456]

Now is that point.

Arma II, your damage tables are bad. And thanks to you, DayZ's damage tables are very, very bad. Your weapon mechanics are bad. You should feel bad.

This is a post about .50 caliber rifles, the myths surrounding them, and to question why the developers just went ahead and threw all of the rules out the window when designing anti-materiel rifles. This is about Videogame Logic^TM in a game that purports to represent "authenticity." It is about some basic failures in weapon mechanics and how they led to some severe game balance issues.

1. These are really big fucking guns. Did someone not get the memo?

The Recoilless Rifle, aka, the M136 rocket launcher, has a loaded weight of 14 lbs. This is larger than the average size of the smaller caliber sniper rifles but not larger than every smaller caliber sniper rifle in the game (the fully equipped M14 is 16 pounds), but it is considered so large that picking one up causes you to abandon your backpack.

The M107 and AS50 both have a weight of 30 lbs and are about as long as a 12 year old kid is tall. But they fit neatly into your backpack. In fact, they take up the same amount of space and cause the same encumbrance as the 6 pound M4A1.

...

What. The. Fuck.

No. Seriously.

Whatthefuck.

P.S.

You can fire this thing standing up? Have you seen what happens when someone fires a .50 caliber weapon standing up?

http://www.myspace.com/video/craig/50-cal-sniper-rifle-standing/22174791#!

2. And they turn people into paste now?

Somewhere someone came up with the idea that high-velocity rounds kill better than low-velocity rounds. As Martin L. Fackler, MD, one of the creators of ballistic gel said on page 7 of the paper "Effects of Small Arms on the Body:"

The kinetic energy fallacy is a smokescreen which hides the actual ways in which the projectile interacts with tissue. Authors who use "kinetic energy transfer" as an explanation of how a projectile causes a particular injury are missing the crux of wound ballistics, as well as spreading the worst kind of misinformation; that which induces complacency by masquerading as knowledge. How much better off this field would be if the words "kinetic energy" were erased from its vocabulary; then one would be forced to look into the mechanical interactions of projectile and tissue wherein lies the key to understanding.

In his conclusion he states:

Recognizing that the penetrating projectile simply crushes tissue to form its hole and that the walls of certain parts of this hole may be dilated or stretched outward for a few milliseconds after the projectile passes, provides the basic foundation needed to understand the effects of projectile on tissue.

"But" one might protest, "the pressure wave of a .50 BMG is so high it can snap the back of a sheep just by passing near it!"

Where the hell did you hear that?

In his paper "What's Wrong with the Wound Ballistics Literature," Fackler says on page 2:

Contrary to popular opinion, this wave does not move or injure tissue.

He continues:

The lithotripter uses this sonic pressure wave to break up kidney stones [and] generates a wave five times the amplitude of the one from a penetrating small arms projectile. Up to 2,000 of these waves are used in a single treatment session, with no damage to soft tissue surrounding the stone.

There are two types of damage: temporary cavitation/stretching damage and permanent cavitation/crushing damage. The first is blunt trauma, like a baseball bat. The second is wounding trauma, like an ice pick. The human body is a shock absorber. Often to exaggerate a bullet's shockwave you'll see people shoot watermelons and blocks of wood. The problem is, if you've ever dropped a watermelon from two feet off the ground, you realize how useless it is to substitute a hunk of fruit for a hunk of meat. The human body is more like a rubber ball than it is an apple. Showing pictures of bullets passing through apples tells you nothing about how bullets interact with people.

It should be noted, however, that stretch from temporary cavity tissue displacement can disrupt blood vessels or break bones at some distance from the projectile path, just as they can be disrupted by blunt trauma. But in practice this happens very rarely. Data from the Vietnam conflict show that the great majority of torso and extremity wounds were attributable to the damage due to the permanent cavity alone.

In article "Wound Ballistics: Analysis of Blunt and Penetrating Trauma Mechanisms", on page 230 of the "Health Science Journal, Volume 4 Issue 4 (2010)," Christina–Athanasia Alexandropoulou, and Elias Panagiotopoulos are a lot more specific:

A review of 1400 rifle wounds from Vietnam (the Wound Data and Munitions Effectiveness Team study) found no cases of bones being broken or major vessels being torn that were not penetrated by the bullet, bullet fragments or secondary missiles. In only two cases, an organ that was not hit (but was within a few centimeters of the projectile path) suffered some disruption. In the vast majority of gunshot wounds, all tissue injured significantly, has been crushed by the intact bullet, bullet fragments or secondary missiles.

To put a fine head on it, here are the holes a .50 caliber weapon makes on impact with a target. The slow-motion images of ripples rolling through ballistic gel or watermelons and barrels of water exploding are used for exaggerated dramatic effect because they look really cool. That shit is stage dramatics.

"But rifle rounds are designed to tumble," one might argue, "and this gives them their incredible lethality."

Well, yes and no, but mostly "maybe."

As Fackler elaborates on page 6 of "Wound Ballistics":

The notion that a common cause of increased wounding is the bullet's striking at yaw angles...or even sideways due to "tumbling" in flight, is clearly fallacious. Anyone who has ever shot a rifle and observed the holes made by the bullet recognizes the they are round, not oblong, as would be the case if they yawed or tumbled in flight.

Okay, you already know that the entrance wound for the .50 caliber is a 1/2 inch hole. Well, Here is the rest of the wound channel for a tumbling .50 caliber BMG round. Notice how the first 8 inches of the wound involve an inch diameter of temporary/stretching damage while the permanent/tearing damage is equivalent to that of a 1/2 inch icepick until it goes eight inches into the body.

You know what parts of the body are shallower than eight inches?

• A human arm.
  
• A human leg.
  
• A human hand.
  
• A human foot.
  
• A human neck.
  
• An average woman's torso front-to-back.
  

The bullet has to go at least 8 inches into the human body for it to even start tumbling and cause the gruesome wounds you expect because it's really damn big and it takes a lot to knock it off course. The stories of legs getting blown off and people being torn in half? Not a very realistic display of the .50 BMGs single-shot killing potential. In fact, it's more likely to overpenetrate your target and make a 1/2 inch hole smaller than a AA battery.

Or as put on page 227 of the Health Science Journal:

A center-fire "high-velocity"rifle bullet, if it traverses only elastic tissue, such as skeletal muscle, does not yaw significantly, does not fragment or deform and does not hit a major blood vessel or nerve. It usually causes a fairly minor wound.

In other words, if you fire a .50 caliber bullet into any part of the human body that is thinner than eight inches, it passes clean through leaving a hole the size of a AA battery.

But, dude, it's a VIDEOGAME!

Oh, so this isn't about realism or authenticity or the boundaries of common sense. This is was done because someone wanted a really big gun to kill people in one hit 3 to 20 times over without sacrificing mobility or storage?

Then stop lying about it and just say that folks are just making another generic videogame so people will stop complaining when they get confused or angry at horrible failures of physics and ballistics design. Problem solved. I'll know exactly what the design goals of this game are and go back to Team Fortress 2 where people don't pretend they're being realistic.

[TheLastRebel 0]

what im shocked is they dont have the most effective weapon at killing zombies also the most common gun in the world the .22 caliber gun da fuq

[A Bush killed me 189]

TL; DR

.50 cals wont matter when standalone is out. There wont be as many of them. As of right now i can get a m107 or as50 with in 20 min of logging in.

Edited August 20, 2012 by A Bush killed me