Leonidas and the 300 Spartans (300) VS Caesar and 300 Apes (Rise of the Planet of the Apes)

Energy is irrelevant because that's not what kills you.

And that's where you're wrong. Energy is the most obscenely relevant thing in this entire discussion. That's what inflicts damage. Tissue is damaged when it is stretched beyond the limits of its elasticity. Spears have very low energy and can only pierce a person because the point and edge of the head focus all of the energy into a small enough place that it can overcome the tensile strength of an opponent's flesh. However, they transfer very little energy to the surrounding tissue and will have a negligible impact to anything they didn't directly hit.

On the other hand, bullets have far more energy and transfer it to the surrounding tissue. This excess energy manifests itself as shockwaves powerful enough that the compression caused by them in itself is enough to damage tissue that the bullet did not directly touch. Therefore, the area of the wound is far greater than one would imagine.

Here is what I'm talking about. I specifically searched that using the caliber and type of bullet the cop was likely to actually use on the chimp. And here is another visual. .40 caliber is what you should look at, as that's what the ballistic gel video used.

And just to restate, the thing about surface area is that it increases drastically in relation to radius. Using the above visual, let's be generous and say the radius of the exit hole wound of the .40 is three times larger than the entry. A = 3.14r2, where A is the area and r is the radius. The radius of a .40 caliber bullet is .2 inches. This gives the entry wound an area of 0.13 square inches. Plug in the increased radius, which only tripled, and the area of the exit wound jumps up to 1.13 square inches. I can't find specs for historical Spartan spears, but I found a handmade one that I will use as an example. The spear head is 3.25 inches wide and .25 inches thick. The area of the wound channel would only be 0.81 square inches.

Even the fucking math is on my side. It may not be perfect, but it at least shows that I'm not totally off-base.

/r/whowouldwin Thread Parent