Thread: Subsonic projectiles, where are we at these days?

That's right. It's hard to get enough kinetic energy with any real subsonic round.
Looking at the biggest, shortest rifle round I know of, the 50 Beowulf: a standard load is 400gr at 1800f fps and 2800 ft.lb. Downloading to 1000 fps might give about 900 ft.lb which could be enough. Even if the bullet didn't expand much, .50" might dissapate energy quickly enough and so some damage.

It seems to be a real engineering challenge to make a bullet that will expand at 1000 fps.

I guess we're into pistol cartridges and pistol bullets ? Don't know anything about them, myself.