22 ARC or 6ARC

[MuleyFever]

I've been on a quest for a rifle for my wife. Factory ammo. The 22 and 6 ARC appear to be the front runners. They appear to have almost identical ballistics using the 88 and 108 eldm. I tend to lean to the 6 since it has about 20% more bullet mass to cause tissue upset. Curious what the group would lean to?

 

[Road_Hunter]

The 6 ARC has more appeal to me, for the same reason you stated. In theory it should be more forgiving of marginal shot placement.

What is it about the 22 that you like?

 

[letrbuck]

For me, it would come down to the regs in the state you hunt, or intended game. In WY, there is a 6mm minimum for elk. So I'd go 6 ARC. If I still did as much coyote hunting as I did when I was in college, 22 ARC

 

[MuleyFever]

The 6 ARC has more appeal to me, for the same reason you stated. In theory it should be more forgiving of marginal shot placement.

What is it about the 22 that you like?

The 22 actually has slightly better down range numbers using the 88 eldm

 

[Road_Hunter]

In terms of energy or drop?

 

[MuleyFever]

In terms of energy or drop?

Velocity, drop and wind. If I remember correctly.

 

[Road_Hunter]

If I was buying primarily a hunting rifle for my significant other, i would rank ft-lbs of energy higher than drop and drift and vice versa if it was intended to be primarily a target rifle. I think the 6 beats the pants off the 22 in the energy category IIRC.

 

[MuleyFever]

If I was buying primarily a hunting rifle for my significant other, i would rank ft-lbs of energy higher than drop and drift and vice versa if it was intended to be primarily a target rifle. I think the 6 beats the pants off the 22 in the energy category IIRC.

Im not really concerned with the energy. The projectile is designed to perform at a velocity threshold, not an energy number.

 

[hereinaz]

The 22 with more velocity out of the same small cartridge and high BC bullets gets a little ballistic edge, but I think it is splitting hairs.

I went with 22 out of my little BR case over 6mm.

If I had a caliber minimum in AZ I would go 6 mm.

There is going to be such a small difference in terminal performance that if you are worried about marginal shots, you will need to jump to double the 88 to get any meaningful difference. Look at all the data with bullet performance out of the humble 223…

 

[Road_Hunter]

The velocity threshold is a proxy for energy. It takes energy to cause a material to deform. The amount of energy required to deform a given material can be determined by integrating the area underneath its stress strain curve. Once this value is known if you can divide by the mass of the projectile and take the square root of that value to determine the minimum velocity required for expansion.

This doesn’t tell the whole story as the bullet imparts energy into the object it is striking. This imparted energy is referred to as “work” in physics and can be defined as the change in kinetic energy (projectile mass x velocity squared). More “work” roughly translates into a bigger wound channel. Shooting over a chronograph is a lot easier than whatever contraption you’d need to measure the energy of a bullet, so that’s the number you see published.

FWIW, the US military uses ft-lbs to gauge whether or not a projectile will incapacitate a soldier, not velocity. I believe they’ve determined that 350 ft-lbs will incapacitate a soldier 50% of the time.

 

[Road_Hunter]

All that said, plenty of deer have succumbed to a 22 win mag behind the ear.

 

[Mojave]

I would do the 22 Creedmoor or 6mm Creedmoor.

 

[huntsman22]

I already had a grendel, so went 22 ARC.....

 

[wind gypsy]

The velocity threshold is a proxy for energy. It takes energy to cause a material to deform. The amount of energy required to deform a given material can be determined by integrating the area underneath its stress strain curve. Once this value is known if you can divide by the mass of the projectile and take the square root of that value to determine the minimum velocity required for expansion.

This doesn’t tell the whole story as the bullet imparts energy into the object it is striking. This imparted energy is referred to as “work” in physics and can be defined as the change in kinetic energy (projectile mass x velocity squared). More “work” roughly translates into a bigger wound channel. Shooting over a chronograph is a lot easier than whatever contraption you’d need to measure the energy of a bullet, so that’s the number you see published.

FWIW, the US military uses ft-lbs to gauge whether or not a projectile will incapacitate a soldier, not velocity. I believe they’ve determined that 350 ft-lbs will incapacitate a soldier 50% of the time.

Welcome to Rokslide. This is a topic that has been debated many times here.

Using energy to extrapolate to what kind of wound it often misleading if comparing different bullets. What matters is what kind of wound a bullet creates within the expected impact velocity window. In this case, i would guess that the difference in energy between the 88 ELDm and 108 ELDm at in a given impact velocity window does correlate well with the wounding behavior due to being same or very similar bullet construction and sectional density. Compare the 88 ELDm from a 22ARC to say a 95 grain barnes LRX from a 6 ARC and the wounds are not going to correlate to energy #'s nearly as well.

For the 22 vs 6 arc comparison, a guy has to decide if the small difference in wounding between the 88 and 108 is worth the trade off incrementally faster, flatter, less wind deflection, less recoil, and less barrel life.