Testing, testing...

[Tony Williams]

Then there is the question of terminal effects with the necessarily long, eco-friendly projectiles. Will they be capable of early yaw in flesh? Photos of M855A1 into bare gel, which would shed some light on that question, have yet to surface.

There's a theory doing the rounds of ammo development people in the UK that a long, pointed bullet will yaw more rapidly and reliably on impact than a short stubby one, because the if the bullet strikes with even a very small degree of yaw already (as most do), all of that mass much further back will make it a lot more unstable. I don't know if they've done any practical testing to demonstrate, that, though, and I'm rather dubious - I think that the construction and internal weight distribution has a greater effect than the shape. Just look at the difference between the yaw performance of the steel-cored 7.62x39 bullet compared with the Yugo lead-cored.