Any ballistic experiments about shot Pattern????

The only site that I have scene about shot Pattern is on one of those "Conspiracy" websites. Any one have info on Shot gun ballistics from a DU acceptable site?????

(edited because I can't spell)

:shrug:

I could just eat you up!!

I can tell you a shot pattern is the pattern the shot makes at a given distance. Exiting the barrel the shot wil spread out as it travels. What you are looking for is a pattern with maximum number of pellets in a 30 in. circle at a given range.

choke constriction/pattern, further complicated by the fact that Cheney's expensive Italian shotgun had two barrels and each was likely to have had a different choke constriction. I bet Cheney ain't tellin' which barrel he fired when he shot his "good friend/acquaintance"-so there will lots of conjecture and no answers. The only way to really tell how a particular load patterns in a particular gun is to shoot it from that particular gun into a sheet of paper from a measured distance, drawing a 30" circle around the densest part and counting the holes inside the circle and comparing that number to the total number of pellets in the load. I don't think Dickie will be loaning out his fancy Perazzi for this type of research during his lifetime.

Penetration is another issue, I've found some info on the penetration of larger size shot into ballistic gelatin, which is supposed to approximate living tissue. This is fraught with difficulty too, since penetration depends on velocity which depends on the powder charge and length of the barrel, ambient temperature and some other factors I have probably forgotten.

Here's a visual of a shot pattern from that fabulous The Blue Republic website...seriously they rock. We can see the "Dickster" at the Quayle range - notice his gun tends to sight a little to the left:

true that pictures are 2 dimensional, but that doesn't look like 90 feet to me....