.22 lr ELR ammo... this is going to be interesting.

[fat tony]

The Swedes were developing the .22 Magnum into a PDW cartridge in the 1970's. The idea went nowhere but they tested the proprietary cartridge out to 300m & beyond. Supposedly the round could penetrate a steel helmet at 300m. It was .17 calibre, the bullets were made of cold formed copper wire.

The gun itself was fairly sophisticated having 3 rnd. burst, locked breech & fired from an open bolt, 1800r/min, with 50 rnd disposable magazines.. It sounds like the cartridge may have used a proprietary powder to get the mv up to 1000 m/s. The Swedes know.

 

[fat tony]

I'll have to do some digging to find it again, but I recently came across some results showing the heel had remained the smaller dimension through flight and impact into soft media targets at ELR ranges. The author seemed to be quite surprised by those results, but the photos showed almost perfect bullets as they'd have been when loaded, with little deformation showing - suggesting that it might not be the internal ballistics expanding the heel as much as thought.

What has your experience with recovering fired .22LR bullets from soft media shown you?