P.D.W. Ballistics Personal Defense Weapons 9mm .223 5.7x28

0:00Well, some fools, men of the J.O. So here from the WWE. When it's just me between matches, it's day one itch. That means it's chumba time with hundreds of casino style games and new titles arriving weekly. There's always something fresh to try at chumba casino. The daily booze make it even more fun. And have me about to get them all during my downtime. Ready for a fun way to chill out and enjoy a few minutes for yourself? Let's chumba. No purchase necessary. VGW Group Void were prohibited by law, CTs and Cs. 21 Plus, sponsored by Chumba Casino. Personal defense weapon ballistics. That lie outside the normal things we would think about. The normal parameters, I get longer than normal 9mm barrel and ballistics or a shorter than normal 223 barrel and ballistics. What about 5'7? Now that's what we're going to talk about today on gunfighter life. PDW ballistics and thoughts. Thanks for tuning in. Welcome to the podcast where we talk about guns, gunfighting,

1:01tactics, ballistics, the right way with God all mighty at the center, biblical Judeo Christian values and real world firsthand experience. I'm blessed to serve you as host military law enforcement private security contracting, competition shooting, other stuff in the background, bullet points and the show notes. Today we're going to talk about PDWs. And I've talked about PDWs before, didn't episode recently. But today I'm talking about PDW ballistics because they may differ from your ordinary ballistics. And I say maybe because they may not. If you carry like a full size fighting handgun and then you're getting something like a SIG flux raider that's basically a handgun with a brace, you're basically going to get the same ballistics. It may increase your shootability, but the ballistics are going to be the same. But if you're going with a PDW with a longer barrel than I millimeter with a longer barrel,

2:01then you're going to gain some velocity. Does that mean increased performance? Maybe, maybe less. How is that possible? Well, we'll get into that. And we might as well get into it now. Let's start with the nine millimeter. In general, most people are, I hope, carrying a gun with at least a four inch barrel, but a four, four, five, five inch barrel, five being at like the maximum. But a full size fighting handgun, somewhere in the four to five inch range, I'm hoping. That's what we're going to consider the baseline today. We're not going to talk about your little baby hashtag me to pocket fantastic plastic things. Talking about fighting handguns versus a PDW. Because a PDW should be more firepower than one of these things. Now, let's look at some numbers here. Let's look at some numbers on nine millimeter in a longer barrel. And a lot of this I'm going to get from ballistics by the inch. This is a site that's been around quite a while.

3:01If you're not familiar with it, it's been around a long, long time. You can talk about looking at it. It looks like one of the early web pages. Because it's been around a long time. Okay, if we look at nine millimeter, if we look at nine millimeter in a five inch barrel with something like a spear gold dot 124 grain, which is a pretty vanilla run of the mill load. Five inches, you're looking at 1259. If we go up to a 10 inch barrel, you're looking at 1338. It is a gain. It's not a significant gain. It's 1200 or something, a 1300 and something. Okay, it's more velocity. Is that better? Well, it depends. Because if you're talking about good hollow point expanding ammunition, which I encourage you to carry, they've gone a lot of work in nine millimeter to make sure that you have a good balance of expansion versus penetration. It's the balancing act, right? If you just want a penetration, you should full metal jacket.

4:02If you just wanted expansion, you should have frangible bullet. But you want that good balance, which we've kind of settled on as the industry standard between 12 and 16 inches. If the bullet expands too rapidly, you won't get the amount of penetration. And if it doesn't expand, you'll get far more penetration, which can be bad if you've got, well, one can be bad because you're not dumping as much energy in a target. And nine millimeter is not a rifle round. It's limited in energy anyway. Somewhere I'm 400 foot pounds for a hot load. If you get too much expansion, you don't get enough penetration. If you get not enough expansion, you get the opposite. So you want to balance that. If you start going outside normal parameters, that ammo may or may not work well. So it may not just be the case that because you get more power that you get more performance, it may not be a one to one ratio there. That's something to be aware of.

5:04And I'm gonna try and do this episode without filling out a bunch of numbers because I know a lot of people unless you're a ballistics nerd, which I am. But unless you are that, your eyes just might gloss over and just numbers, bullet grain, weight, velocity, foot pounds, blah, blah, blah. And you may not care. So I'm gonna try and keep it entertaining and relevant. We look at another comparison, which is one of my favorite things, which is 147 grains in a nine millimeter. We look at just over 1,000 for a federal 147 grain. And again, this is ballistics by the inch. And we go to 1,067 for a 10 inch barrel. Not much gain after going to that barrel. Okay, so it looks like in nine millimeter. In a PDW, I would consider around a 10 inch barrel. If you're going like a 16 inch barrel, that's more of like a full size pistol caliber carbine. Not what I would call a personal defense weapon.

6:06I would say you're probably looking at 10 inches around there. Maybe it's 11 or maybe it's 12, but 10 or less, probably in a PDW in nine millimeter. So not a significant gain in power or velocity. But what about, if we're talking about 223? 223 is one of the other main things you're gonna see in PDW is like an AR with a brace with a shorter barrel. Call it a 10, 11, 12 inch barrel. For that, we're gonna compare the normal. Right, well, I consider the normal. And you could have made the argument a decade ago that the normal would have been a 20 inch barrel, but in today's day and age, probably your normal, NA223 is gonna be your 16 inch barrel, right? So let's look at that. If we look at a 55 grain, this is a, again, ballistics by the inch, Remington UMC, 55 grain. If we're looking at a 16 inch,

7:07we're looking at 29, 43 feet per second. Night and day difference of velocity between that and the nine millimeter. Well, what if we go down to that 10 inch barrel? Then you're looking at 26, 16. Before in the nine millimeter, we're looking at, you know, with difference of maybe less than 100 feet a second. Now we're looking at several hundred feet of second difference. We're looking at, again, 29, 43, 29, 43 versus versus 26, 16. Now if we look at an even shorter barrel, it starts to get noticeable, right? If we were to do something like a six inch barrel, we're going from 29, 83 down to 20, 41. That's a significant drop off. Now, I would tell you, if you're going with a classic direct impingement, 223, I would encourage you to stay between a 11 half,

8:0912 and a half inch barrel, because those systems are pretty well proven. You've still got your carbene length gas system, which is proven. You've got enough barrel after the gas system to have reliable function and pressure. You may or may not get reliability if you go shorter than that, but there are several PDWs available in 223 that are shorter than that. So I thought I would throw in the ballistics again. 16 inch for a 55 gram bullet listed here for Remington of Remington load. Ballistics by the end, 16 inch, 29, 43, 10 inch, 26, 16, and a six inch, 20, 41. We really started to get to a lot of the finishing return really quickly with that round, which again was originally designed for like a 20 inch barrel. But it does fairly decent down to a 10 inch barrel if I'm being honest. Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing, another checkered flag for the books. Time to celebrate with Jamba. Jump in at JambaCasino.com. Let's Jamba. No purchase necessary, VTW Group,

9:10Boyd, we're prohibited by law. CCNC, 21 plus sponsored by JambaCasino. Okay, there is another. How about the FN 57 by 28? Now I didn't get this one from Ballistics by the inch. Why? Because that website is so old, they don't have five, five, seven all in there. It wasn't real common then. But, but if we look at five, seven by 28, which is a PDW round design for APDW, design for the PS90. If we look at loads listed by FN, the kind of their standard FN load is a 40 grain. They have a 40 grain Hornady V-MAC, which is a real common load. And it lists for the 5.7 pistol of velocity of 1738. And it lists for the PS90 of velocity of 2034. There's right around almost exactly 300 feet per second difference in a pistol versus APDW. And I believe the PS90, the actual PS90,

10:11has a 10 inch barrel. So, there you go. And that's a real common loading. Now I must point out those numbers. That's a 40 grain bullet compared to the 556, which we went with a 55 grain bullet. And you can even go much higher with a 556. I don't, you could even argue that a 55 grain isn't even the standard anymore for 556. Things have gotten a lot heavier. But, I don't wanna go too deep into the numbers. Okay, some thoughts. The next thing I'm gonna say is that a 57 by 28, even in a shorter barrel is not a 556. There's a significant difference. One of them being a resource elective M Carbo, they have a pretty simple breakdown of the specs of 223 and 57 by 28. But the one that stands out the most is case capacity. Case capacity of both cartridges, it lists the 556 as 28.5 grains.

11:14It lists the 57 as 13.9 grains. So almost half are about half. It's about half the potential energy. If you consider powder, you know, potential energy of a cartridge, it's about half. Now, granted, it's gonna be a little bit more efficient in general because, you know, it takes a longer barrel to burn more powder. So you're probably gonna give up less, going to a shorter barrel, but not that much, so that's not double, right? So, yeah, 57 by 28 is a decent PDW round. It was designed as a PDW round, but, less we forget, the PS90 was designed to be a full auto PDW. It wasn't designed for a round, a round effectiveness. It was designed to be really controllable in full auto. And if you've ever shot a bit of full auto, which I have, in general, I'm gonna tell you, it's a waste of time and money. Unless it's like a belt fed biopod or tripod mounted

12:16cruiser weapon, like a 240 golf, like a media machine gun, a heavy machine gun, those are meant to be machine guns full auto. Usually a shoulder fired weapon in full auto, it's probably worse. You should probably just keep it in semi-auto and shoot it in semi-auto, the vast majority of the time. The PS90, a little bit different. One of the reasons they designed that to be a very light, low recoil cartridge is because it was designed to be shot in full auto with 50 round max in a full auto shoulder fired weapon. And I think in that guys, it would be phenomenal, but you and I can't have that. So that's off the table. You're looking at one round per one round. If you're doing, you know, slower aimed fire. So that is something to consider. I'm not saying it's a bad round, but what I am saying is even in a PDW, it's not 556. So don't pretend it's 556. Even if you're looking at comparable velocities, you're looking at a much lighter projectile. So it's not 556. That said, it's probably more efficient. So there is something gonna be said for efficiency.

13:17You just, you should research it for yourself, but just talking through it here. Okay, my thoughts on the 556 in the shorter barrel, it generally it's designed for the longer barrels. Now, because of the Hague Convention, which we didn't sign, but we generally go by anyway, a lot of the military rounds are full metal jackets and a 556 or 223, which despite them being full metal jackets, something like an XM193, which is a 55 grain full metal jacket, they can do pretty well out of a rifle because they're going so fast, they can fragment and tumble. And even though they're full metal jacket, they're going at such high velocity, they can fragment or tumble and do pretty decent damage for what they are, for a cheap full metal jacket round. I would not, I would not count on that in a PDW. I would not count on that in something with a much shorter barrel, because it may not have the energy to fragment or tumble

14:18in which case you're doing way, way less damage than you might think. But for that, on the civilian side, there is a lot more ammunition types available. There are hollow points, like actual hollow points, there are varmableits, which are designed to have dramatic expansion out of a rifle, shooting something like a prairie dog out of a 24 inch barrel, but you may see decent results with something like a 50 grain or a 55 grain horn DV max out of a PDW. It's not going to fragment nearly as much as out of a 24 inch barrel, but it may do significantly more damage than you would do, obviously with a then a full metal jacket, and you may still get decent penetration, because you're not going to get just like the handgun hollow points or a balance, you're not going to get as rapid of an expansion because you were getting less velocity. So you may get sufficient penetration and decent expansion out of a PDW and a 556 with a shorter barrel, if you use the right ammo. That's a lot of ifs, a lot of ifs that you, their shooter have to test, not some gun tube or told me,

15:20but you should test out of your gun out of your barrel, one that it's reliable, and two, well, one that it's reliable, two that it shoots point of aim, point of impact, three that you can afford to train with it, and four that it's going to do decent terminally, which means you're going to have to do some testing, which is a lot on your end. I have a load like that for my short barrel they are, which does really well, and I've tested all those things. But that's work that you have to do. I'm going to be honest, a lot of people don't do that work. They just think, oh, this box of ammo has got a cool hologram on it, or so and so I've said it was a sweet round, even though they're shooting out of 16 inch guns, you put it in your 10-5 and think you're good to go. You're not good to go. You may be good to go, but it's untested. Don't trust your life to anything I'm proven, don't be a beta tester and a gun fight. So those are some thoughts there. Some other thoughts on PDW ballistics. Nine millimeter ammo is cheaper. It's quite a bit cheaper than 556 ammo.

16:24Both are probably the cheapest and their center fire realm, right? Nine millimeters of cheapest center fire handgun round, and 556 is probably by far going to, well, I don't know by far, but it's probably going to be your most affordable unless you run on some crazy sale of like eight millimeter mausers somewhere, but probably going to be your most affordable common center fire rifle round. Even so, you're probably looking at about double-ish, and I've been doing a bit of shopping to buy some ammo before the prices go up, and it's probably about double. Training is important. What's your ammo budget, right? So you can probably practice about twice as much with the handgun, with the handgun caliber PDW and you're going to be able to practice for the same amount of money with a 556. Us, and that's even more true if you're talking about those specialty PDW rounds. Now you could do even more research and get a full metal jacket round, and like a frangible or varmant style round that shoots the same point of aim point of impact,

17:26but you've got to find all that out, which requires you to buy several boxes of different kinds of ammo, which adds up pretty quick asking me how I know. Where was I? So you're going to be able to train more with the handgun round. Now you do lose quite a bit of velocity. If you're talking about short barrel, the 556, it's still more powerful, in my opinion, if you choose the right ammo, if you choose the wrong ammo, it's probably far less effective. But if you choose decent well-thought-out ammo, I still think it's quite a bit more effective than a nine millimeter in a PDW, even though you do lose quite a bit of velocity. And nine millimeter, you gain a little bit of velocity, but it's very little. So you're still comparing a handgun to a pretty weak sauce intermediate rifle round, but it's still a rifle round. Even in a PDW, I think looking at the numbers, you do lose a decent amount of velocity, but you start with a whole lot more. So again, and ammo selection can make up for a lot of that.

18:26But again, training is important. So if you're not going to be the guy to do all the research and find loads that are comparable to your own ballistics testing and do all that, you might be better off with a nine millimeter. And if your budget is on the lighter side, let's say that you have, you know, $100 a paycheck, $200 a month for ammo for training. Then you're gonna be able to train more with a nine millimeter than the 556, which putting around where you needed to go when you needed to go there with the gun that you have, that's way more important than ballistics anyway. So the price right there, that's a big factor. And 57 by 28, going back to that one, the price on that and the popularity that has surged in the last several years, even though it's been around since 1990. It's really surged in the past, let's say five years, six years, whenever, however, it's not in general, unless you find a sale somewhere, it's probably not cheaper than 556.

19:26It's certainly probably not gonna be cheaper than nine millimeter. So those are some thoughts there. Also, it's nowhere near as common as either one of those. So there's gonna be nowhere near the amount of loads or ammo availability, as there will be with the other two calibers. It does offer probably the highest, well, out of a PDW, it'd be close, but it offers a, I don't know, I'd have to crunch numbers, which I don't wanna do anymore of that in this episode, but it's got a very high power to rate ratio and especially size to power ratio. Like if you look at a box of 50, 57 rounds, it's teeny tiny compared to the other rounds we're talking about. And if you talk about nine millimeter because the projectile is what has the weight and you're talking about like 124 grain to 147 grain versus a 40 grain bullet. Night and day difference between those two as far as like you're carrying 100 rounds of each. You're just looking at significant weight savings in the 57. On firearms, really, there are really good firearms

20:31available in each one of these calibers. There are some really cool guns available in each caliber. They're really good PDWs in nine millimeter, all the way back to the, you know, the H&K MP5 or the civilian semi-auto variant of that. They're really good PDWs in 57. The PS90 civilian version and others, something like the CMMG Banshee, which is also available in nine millimeter and 556, right there are a very affordable short-barrel day hours nowadays, the AR market, we are in the good old days of the AR market. So if you don't have several really good ARs, like a good go-to and then a backup, you know, that's, I don't know the other being more affordable than they are right now, especially with the price of metals and things going up. So that's a really good option for the affordability. A lot of the cheaper PCCs and PDWs in nine millimeter are gonna be straight blowback, which it's a very simple system,

21:33but it also means you, in general, get a lot more recoil because you have a big, heavy bolt. The only thing, the only thing really stopping that gun from blowing up is a big, heavy bolt, which means you have a lot of mass for reciprocating back and forth, which in general is not great for fast, you know, low recoil shooting. So if you want the best of that, you probably want a delayed system. And those tend to be pretty pricey, something like an MP5, something like a Banshee, something like the Springfield Quna. And you're probably looking at more than a 223. These are just some thoughts. It's a lot and PDW ballistics are a bit different, again, than traditional handgun ballistics or traditional rifle ballistics. They're kind of their own thing. So I thought it was worth its own episode. I hope it was helpful. I thought it was thought provoking. For a lot of people that live in, and or work in urban suburban environments, a PDW makes a lot of sense for the modern world. I love hunting rifles. I like really nice bolt action rifles.

22:33I love elk hunting on mountains, but most people don't do that, right? For most people that, you know, work in a cubicle and commute in a mobile box, they go home and sleep and repeat and spend their time in urban areas. A PDW, except for the handgun that you have on, you might be the second most practical gun you can have. I'd say the shotgun, and I would love that, and I would love if most people hunted, but something like 5% of the US population hunts. So many people wouldn't know what to do with the deer if it was laying in front of them. And it was already dying. They wouldn't know how to skin it and gut it, bleed it out and preserve it and all that stuff. So as much as I love the shotguns for Sicily, a lot of people aren't gonna be able to take advantage of that versatility. For the average, what I would say, urbanite, suburbanite, yuppie, and I don't mean that disparaging, like young urban professional yuppie, that's what it stands for, which is not really a disparaging term. For the average yuppie, city, suburban driller, which a lot more people are than I think would like to admit,

23:35just because you have a jacked up truck or you wear a camo does not make you country. But anyway, for the average yuppie, the average suburbanite, urbanite, lives in a cul-de-sac. The PDW may be next to the hang-in you have on you all the time, the second most practical gun. So I think they probably should have more thought and discussion than they do. So some thoughts on the PDW ballistics. Tactical tip of the day. Maybe a good practice to have an extra lower. Like you have X amount of ARs, you have X plus one of lower. You always have another lower. Even if it's just stashed away, when you see a good sale on one, you see them for dirt cheap prices. I've lived through enough gun and ammo scares to know that stuff can dry up really quickly. You may not seem like it now and guns are everywhere and ammo's everywhere

24:36and everybody's trying to push you to buy the next hot round or the next cool thing, guns are everywhere. But trust me, a very small portion of the US population is actively buying guns or ammo. If that cranks up from 5% to 25%, that stuff goes away real quick. I've lived through it enough times to know. So if something like that happens for whatever reason, on an AR, which is a super versatile platform, it's so modular, it's not my favorite, right? There's a lot of things I don't like about the AR, I'm not an AR, you know, apologist, but there's a lot of things I don't like. But it's very versatile. So having an extra lower, that you can get right now for about 50 bucks or something, that you could, like, let's say in the future, like, oh yeah, I wanna build a PDW, you can build a PDW. I just built a, I just built a CMP rifle. Last year I just shot CMP, Civilian Marksmanship Program, high power service rifle. I just shot it with whatever, you know, one of the middle 16 inch AR that I had. But this year I bought, I built a dedicated, more dedicated to that sport competition.

25:38Service rifle, 20 inch barrel, fixed stock, more akin to an M16, which maybe I'll talk about in its own episode, but that's just an example, right? You may decide in the future, you know, I have this niche I wanna fill, and that may come at a time where you can't just go out and buy an AR, because they've dried up, they're one of the first ones usually to dry up. Well, the regulated part is the lower, and the lower is one of the cheapest parts. I mean, I'm talking big components, not like springs or something, but of the large components, the lower is fairly affordable. So, and I don't even know if that's true anymore, because everything's so affordable on an AR, barrels are so affordable, you know, uppers are so affordable, triggers are really affordable, so as I was, it's a very affordable component, and it's the regulated one, it's the one that's going to be regulated or dry up really quickly. So, consider having X plus one for your gun algebra test today, consider having X, X plus one equals lower, you should have.

26:39Number of rifles you have plus one equals the number you should probably have. Algebra, in your teacher said, you'd never use it outside of school, right? Or your teacher said you'd use it every day, whatever. Anyway, that short tip, have an extra lower, they're super cheap, and available right now. Next time you order a gun online, if they have a place to add a lower, see if they have any cheap lowers, just have an extra one. Even if you don't want to build one in the future, and there is a big gun scare, be a pretty good bar to write them. Okay, enough on that, your tactical verse of the day. Part of Psalm 91. I shall not be afraid of the terror by night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that walks in darkness, nor the destruction that lays waste at noon day. It's part of Psalm 91. The whole thing is beautiful. It's good to have a couple of, what I would call, hit pocket,

27:40verses that you have memorized. I'm not saying what you should memorize, but that's a good one to look at if you want to memorize Psalm 91. It's fairly lengthy, but you can probably memorize it. So, that's your verse of the day. Scary things in the world, they're nothing new, but they shouldn't scare us as Christians. We're called to fear only one thing, and that's Almighty God in Him alone, if He is for us who can be against us for another bonus verse there. Thanks for listening and have a blessed day. Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing. The rush of racing, nothing beats it, but Jumpa Casino comes close. Jumpa's got fast spins, fun games, daily bonuses, and all the action you can handle. Now, that's a ride. Ready to hit the throttle? Get in the driver's seat and head to chumbachsino.com. Let's chumbach. Sponsored by Chumbachasino. No purchase necessary, VGW group void were prohibited by law, 21 plus terms and conditions apply.