Like when something gets shot is it the kinetic energy of the bullet or it’s momentum or the force or something else? What determines how much damage does the bullet do?
In: Physics
That sort of depends on what you understand as “damage”. Is a clean hole a lot of damage or very little damage in your opinion?
So for the sake of discussion, I’ll assume you mean “how badly the target is mangled”, and a clean hole counts as “little damage”. That’s how most people interpret that.
In that case, how much of the kinetic energy can be transferred from the projectile into damaging the target.
So a projectile that makes a tiny hole carries on with most of its kinetic energy intact.
But a projectile that doesn’t manage to punch through cleanly instead is forced to dump most of its energy into the target, damaging it.
How and why either result happens is unfortunately a very complex topic that I’m personally not sure how to ELI5, because even the same projectile will penetrate differently based on speed alone, but the shapes and materials make a massive difference too.
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