re ballistic gel. I know nothing about it per se, but any "test" mandates controlling variables. If variables are not controlled your "test" is invalid (or certainly a LOT less valid) for comparison purposes, becasue you cant say whether the result was due to performance of the subject, or if it was more determined by an uncontrolled variable, and to what degree. Real life has variables that make it harder to draw conclusions from or use for comparison purposes. But the test has to actually represent (or be correlated to) reality in order to draw conclusions from it. Also, tests in general are often representing reality based on one technology and the mechanisms by which it works--if a new technology comes along that accomplishes the same thing via a different mechanism, there is nothing that says the old test will still be predictive of THAT performance in reality--so while it sounds like ballistics gel is a pretty good representation of "reality", I like the comment above that tests always need to be compared to reality, and any time there is a significant divergance from what the test predicts you DO have to ask yourself if the test is actually capable of predicting reality. in this case it sounds like the reality and the test match pretty closely. So what's to question?