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Kyrie · 02-13-2019, 06:24 PM

Found the TM I'd mentioned earlier.

Here is the TM page for commercial 9 mm Luger ammunition. I've boxed in red the info I thought especially interesting:

And here is the page for the US army rendition of 9 mm Luger, a la NATO:

If we were to take the data from these two pages at face value we would have to conclude US army 9 mm Luger NATO is the weak sister of US commercial 9 mm Luger.

But there is a potential problem lurking here; the TM doesn't tell us whether the same test method and procedures were used to produce both sets of data.

If both data sets were determined using the same methods/procedures then the data sets are comparable and US army NATO is slower and has a lower chamber pressure than US, SAAMI compliant, 9 mm Luger.

If both data sets were not determined using the same methods/procedures then the data sets cannot be meaningfully compared. While we still have the caveat from page 12-3 that use of commercial 9 mm Luger is not authorized in the M9 pistol and what that caveat implies, the pressure/velocity data sets just can't be used to draw any comparative conclusions.

Such is the wild, and sometimes counterintuitive, world of internal ballistics :-)

02-13-2019, 06:24 PM	#24
Kyrie User Join Date: Jun 2002 Posts: 757 Thanks: 0 Thanked 212 Times in 101 Posts	Found the TM I'd mentioned earlier. Here is the TM page for commercial 9 mm Luger ammunition. I've boxed in red the info I thought especially interesting: And here is the page for the US army rendition of 9 mm Luger, a la NATO: If we were to take the data from these two pages at face value we would have to conclude US army 9 mm Luger NATO is the weak sister of US commercial 9 mm Luger. But there is a potential problem lurking here; the TM doesn't tell us whether the same test method and procedures were used to produce both sets of data. If both data sets were determined using the same methods/procedures then the data sets are comparable and US army NATO is slower and has a lower chamber pressure than US, SAAMI compliant, 9 mm Luger. If both data sets were not determined using the same methods/procedures then the data sets cannot be meaningfully compared. While we still have the caveat from page 12-3 that use of commercial 9 mm Luger is not authorized in the M9 pistol and what that caveat implies, the pressure/velocity data sets just can't be used to draw any comparative conclusions. Such is the wild, and sometimes counterintuitive, world of internal ballistics :-)