A Stability Formula for Plastic-Tipped Bullets Part 1: Motivation and Development of New Formula

TL;DR

This paper introduces a modified gyroscopic stability formula tailored for plastic-tipped bullets, addressing the limitations of the original Miller twist rule by accounting for the lower density of plastic tips.

Contribution

A new amended formula for calculating the gyroscopic stability of plastic-tipped bullets is developed, improving accuracy over the original Miller twist rule.

Findings

The new formula better estimates stability for bullets with uniform core density.

It underestimates stability for bullets with significantly less dense cores.

Experimental validation shows improved accuracy for certain plastic-tipped bullets.

Abstract

Part 1 of this paper describes a modification of the original Miller twist rule for computing gyroscopic bullet stability that is better suited to plastic-tipped bullets. The original Miller twist rule assumes a bullet of constant density, but it also works well for conventional copper (or gilding metal) jacketed lead bullets because the density of copper and lead are sufficiently close. However, the original Miller twist rule significantly underestimates the gyroscopic stability of plastic-tipped bullets, because the density of plastic is much lower than the density of copper and lead. Here, a new amended formula is developed for the gyroscopic stability of plastic-tipped bullets by substituting the length of just the metal portion for the total length in the $(1 + L^2)$ term of the original Miller twist rule. Part 2 describes experimental testing of this new formula on three plastic-tipped bullets. The new formula is relatively accurate for plastic-tipped bullets whose metal portion has nearly uniform density, but underestimates the gyroscopic stability of bullets whose core is significantly less dense than the jacket.