Follow-Up on Big Game

Having had some time to consider my last post, and in no small part due to our good friends at zombiehunters.org (who of course had a detailed thread on weapon choices for Jurassic Park, including in-depth analysis of T-Rex anatomy), I've found a tentative solution to my dinosaur/dragon quandary.

Turns out the the theoretical mass of an adult T-Rex is roughly the same as that of a mature African elephant, at about 4.5 tons. While there'd theoretically be some variances in bone and muscle mass and placement, anything that works to put down an elephant will work as well or better against a T-Rex. All sorts of ways to put down an elephant, with varying degrees of expediency. African poachers don't bother with things like big-game rifles (which cost about $5 for every round), or even heavy military hardware (interestingly, .50 BMG weapons and ammo are fairly common in that part of the world). They just use AK-47s loaded with cheap FMJ military ammo. They empty a magazine or two, and then go have a cigarette while the animal bleeds out.

I've got a lot better than an AK-47 already. But I worry about the time it would take for a T-Rex to bleed out. They've purportedly got aggression issues that suggest need for a quick put-down. I've also never been a big believer in the mag-dump as a tactic, and not going to default to it here, since there are aimed-fire options. The posture of a T-Rex means that tactics that work on humans (but which usually won't work on big-game) will work on a T-Rex. Specifically: shoot them in the throat.  Fired into soft fleshy substances, a .308 soft-nose hunting round makes a permanent wound cavity about the size of a softball, and does severe tissue damage (a 'temporary cavity' of torn soft tissues, veins, and arteries) to an area the size of a basketball.   There's a reason that international treaties bar them from military use. An M1A magazine holds 20 rounds. That's a lot of tissue damage - even to something the size of a T-Rex - with a fairly large target area (on the centerline, under the chin or into the mouth) packed with big veins and arteries, besides important things like wind-pipes and spinal columns. Even going for pure head-shots (almost never as good an idea as people think it is) would work better than with elephants, since a T-Rex's skull structure is much less robust than an elephants, and would at very least encourage the pursuit of less well-armed meals than me.

So pending further analysis (or some cool application of thermite, which I'll keep on the table), my dinosaur/dragon plan is to put a few magazines of soft-nose big game ammo in with my Aliens package (M1A, 1911, short-sword), and to aim for the throat.