30 Cal vs Body Armor

[su_heading size=”30″]Will the military grade ballistic plate stop these rounds? [/su_heading]

[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”5″]W[/su_dropcap]atch as Jerry Miculek pits an AR-10 .30 cal against body armor with some high-volume rapid fire. Jerry is trying to duplicate what Richard Ryan of Full Mag did, and that is he fired a .30 cal machine gun at a piece of armor. Jerry will be using the same cal with an AR-10 with the standard NATO 7.62 ball 147 grain rounds.

ar_10_30_calThere it is, the plates were able to absorb the hits against it, round after round. There is a reason modern light infantry and combat soldiers wear integrated soft-body armor and plates. It allows troops to absorb unbelievable strikes and survive. Fifty years ago, no soldier would have survived this many direct hits to the chest and vitals; today’s warrior can survive and even get back into the fight.

The downside in the last twenty years is the weight a combat soldier has had to carry; the body armor alone could weigh up to 20 pounds. Add this to weapons, magazines, grenades, med kit, water, small-pack and the average grunt could be humping 77 pounds or more. An energy sapping load, especially in the heat of Iraq or Afghanistan. Thank goodness technology advances and body armor is weighing less and less; which is a good thing if you are the ground-pounder.

[su_heading size=”30″]Video Transcription[/su_heading]

Hey guys, I’m Jerry Miculek, and what I’m tryin’ to do today is to duplicate what Richard Ryan did with Fullmag, on his minigun attempt to shoot this piece of steel. And he’s had this thirty-caliber minigun, and it’s shooting about three-thousand rounds a minute, and what he did was fire on that piece of steel, you see downrange, and he put about four hits in it, and appeared to hold about three seconds before it fell to the ground, so I’m gonna try to duplicate that. I’ve got a thirty-caliber M&P10, Same caliber, 762×51 NATO. I’ve got some standard 147-grain 30caliber ball, and I’m gonna turn around and on the clock, I’m gonna see how many times I can hit that target before it flips over or leaves. So uh, let’s see what that looks like!

Alright! Eyes and ears! Heeere we go!
[Loud beep]
[Rapid fire]

And it finally fell over! Haha! Alright, let’s clear it out! Alright!
We are clear!

I did fire twelve rounds, in exactly two-point-five-hundredths of a second! So let’s go see what we did.

ar_10Hey guys I got the target, I went downrange to get it, we had about sixteen inches of rain out here in the past week, so it’s kinda boggy, we didn’t wanna bring the camera down there. But anyway! To give you an idea of the total time from the first to my last shot -which was twelve rounds- was two-point-zero-five-one-hundredths of a second, and I actually struck the target five times. So my hit ratio was like a forty-one percent, so– which is not bad for full-caliber ammo at about twenty-five, twenty-eight yards. So I give you an idea what the hits are: We’ve got one here, two, three, four, and five. So we’ve got five hits on a target. One thing that I want to point out to you, this- the way this plate is made, it’s made for light body armor, so it has this protective coating on the front is actually made to be worn in a vest like this, and the idea of this coating is to stop a lot of the spalling from the round hitting the plate, and you can see on the bottom it’s starting to lift it off with five hits. But if you were wearing it on your chest, most of the spalling or the frag would be contained, and that’s one reason I got a little bit brave and got within about twenty eight, thirty yards of that target. Otherwise if that was bad(?) steel, light steel, I wouldn’t have done this. So the target withstood the beating, and what can I say about a 41% hit ratio? So, not bad for twelve rounds.

by Andy Van Loan
Source: Miculek.com Youtube

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