If you’re well-read in science fiction, there’s a good chance you’ve read L. Sprague de Camp’s “A Gun for Dinosaur.” Now Scott from Kentucky Ballistics tests just how big a gun you need to take out a ballistic gel replica of a T-Rex skull.
Guns used:
There are evidently only 20 .577 Tyrannosaur rifles, and only four .950 JDJs, in the world. One of the latter sold for just under $1 million last year, so if resurrected cloned dinosaurs do make a comeback, hunting them will probably be a very expensive hobby…
When I asked my the question, she said “All of them.” Good answer.
Not under One Million dollars – actually it hammered for a bit less than $100,000.
pjk
[Math is hard. -LP]
Personally, I came to hate that book with its ‘a rifle powerful enough to knock a dinosaur down’ crap.
I think David Drake had it right in ‘Time Safari’: you’d need a rifle powerful enough, and with the right bullet, to penetrate muscle and bone deep enough to hit vitals from any angle. No ‘knock the beast down’ nonsense.
If resurrected cloned dinosaurs do make a comeback hunting them may be an expensive hobby, but it won’t be a $1,000,000 (or even $100,000) per gun hobby. ‘Murica being ‘Murica gun manufacturers would begin producing T Rex capable rifles to fill the now non-existent demand for such firearms. Through the miracle of free-market competition prices would be driven down to the absolute minimum consistent with a reasonable profit after capitalizing development costs.