Re: AET rounds

[Robert "J." Hansen <rjhansen@xxxxxxxx>]

>        Is the AET ammunition described in the book real or fictitious?

Real.  An AET is just a bullet that's designed to shed its energy as
quickly as possible after hitting the target.  When ME came out, there
was a theory of wound ballistics that said that extremely fast energy
dump was necessary for one-shot stops.  The theory's since been
discredited.

Let's say that I shoot you in the stomach with a .45 Glaser (which is
one kind of an AET).  In ME, that's a one-shot stop.  In the real world,
the Glaser dumps all of its energy in the first inch or two of the soft
tissues of your stomach.  Hurts like hell and you'll die of peritonitis
in a week, but it's not immediately life-threatening.  If you're hopped
up on drugs, you won't even feel it.

If I shoot you in the gut with a .22, the .22 penetrates through,
perforates internal organs, nicks an artery or two, might even blow
through your spinal column and paralyze you.  If you're hopped up on
drugs, you still won't feel it, but no amount of drugs in the world can
make you ignore a severed spinal cord or a ruptured inferior vena cava
or descending aorta.

In order to get critical, immediately life-threatening injuries, you
oftentimes have to penetrate into the body deeply enough to get to where
the major blood vessels and organs are.  AETs fail to do this.