Another data point, results are not surprising after the hundreds of photos but, holy crap Batman. This was nasty,
Decent 8 point for my area, dressed weight was 175 pounds. Rifle is a t3x lite with a 16” factory barrel, AB A-10 .30 cal suppressor, Trijicon Huron in UM Tikka rings.
Shooting 77TMK handloads. Not sure on velocity as I have not chrono’d, but the bullets are seated over 23 grains of TAC. I’m thinking MV is somewhere around 2600-2650 with my short barrel, but who knows. Got the rifle pretty recently to try this year after reading the thread a few times and haven’t had time to really play with a load and make them go fast.
Buck was shot at less than 10 yards, so despite my likely slow MV, this is a pretty high velocity impact all things considered, on a pretty good sized buck. Shot entered behind the onside shoulder and ended up in the offside shoulder. No exit. Buck went 15 yards and tipped over.
Onside wound after peeling a couple of layers back. Easily golf ball sized, if not larger. Hit a rib on the way in.
The wound leaving the body cavity on the offside is a little bit smaller, but impressive nonetheless (no pictures).
Ended up taking a screenshot of the original photo of the offside shoulder to get the file small enough to upload. The shoulder is SMASHED. To the point that when I was skinning and quartering an hour ago I said “dang, I think this buck was hit by a car”. And then I saw a lot of clotting and said “oh wow, someone else shot this buck and he lived”
And THEN I found a piece of a copper jacket that had the little itty bitty piece of the very bottom of the little .22 boat tail. Nope, nobody else shot him, it was all from my bullet. The damage it did to the offside after traveling through 12” of deer and throwing fragments everywhere was astonishing. Also note that I found a ton of bone fragments in front of the diaphragm when I was gutting, to me it was an abnormal amount. There was a ton of destruction especially to bones a lot of that offside shoulder is junk.
I’m mostly a bowhunter, and bring the rifle out to “bat cleanup” and use it as a meat tool, but this is on par, if not worse than any deer I’ve shot with a .30 cal. Impressive to say the least.