Kristopher wins the No Prize prize for correctly answering the question of the mystery projectile.
In the late 70’s and early 80’s National Cartridge built a few dozen thousand of the “Exploder” brand cartiridges in .380ACP, .38Spl, 9mm, .357Mag, 10mm, .41Mag, .45ACP, .44Spl and .44Mag.
In the .45ACP like the one shown, a 230gr projectile was hollowed out and opened up to accept a percussion cap and a quantity of black powder. I can’t remember exactly how many grains it was.
The theory was that the bullet’s impact would set off the cap and powder causing massive damage to whatever was hit. This was the 70’s and 80’s. They didn’t have computer modeling to design a better projectile. Hell, about all they had was inconsistent (aka: crappy) ballistic gel and clay to determine the effectiveness of what they sent downrange.
It worked, but only some of the time. The percentage of positive results was, of course, dependent upon what it hit. The cartridge I have is from one of the sessions when a member of my family and some friends ran the .45ACP and .41Mag rounds through a number of tests.
Soft tissue gave the biggest number of fails. But hard substances such as wood or drywall (walls/doors) or glass or sheet metal (a car door) gave it almost a 100% positive result. If it hit bone before hitting the soft tissue, you had an 80% positive result.
The tests I saw completed were done in wet phones books and large clay blocks, with and without things like clothing, early Kevlar (what we’d consider today to be “Level 1”) and rib bones (from last night’s dinner) placed in front of them, cars, target boards to replicate walls and doors, and game animals.
Clothing did nothing to improve the result. Kevlar actually reduced the number of positives. Like I said above, wood, drywall, sheet metal and glass increased the success rate to nearly 100%. But it ended up just blasting the projectile into a few small bits, and one large bit. You can probably guess what the result of sending a lot of shrapnel would be.
The bones in front of the phone books and clay, and the hits on game animals gave a rather interesting result: A blast cavity the size of a large cantaloupe or a one person watermelon. In the game animals, there was almost nothing left of the organs that previously resided in that area. Just mush pushed to the edge of the cavity.
But only 80% of the time. Otherwise it was a ball round that moved a tad bit faster than a standard 230gr.
Most likely because of the failure rate and the price ($1.50 per round in 1980 dollars) the company either stopped making them or went out of business entirely. I don’t remember which.
If I can round up something along the lines of some phone books and a bucket to soak them in I’ll see if Kevin will let me fire this last bad boy at them through the ParaUSA GI Expert on one of the GBR rangedays.
I remember reading that when W.D.M. Bell first went to Africa, one of his rifles was a .405 Winchester, and some of the ammo was of this type. His results were lousy; the thing almost always went off, but basically just made a big, nasty flesh wound that rarely went much below the surface.
It DID really piss off Cape buffalo, however…