slug (projectile)

For other meanings, see Slug (disambiguation) A slug is a solid ballistic projectile, often fired from a shotgun,which turns it more into a sort of large bore rifle. It is "solid" in the sense of being composed of one piece, unlike shot, but is nearly always actually hollow since a solid piece of lead filling a shotgun barrel and long enough to be ballistically stable would be far too heavy to fire from a shotgun. Shotgun slugs were introduced by Wilhelm Brenneke in 1898. Although these slugs had angled ribs on them, they were not intended—as is widely supposed—to act as a sort of inverse rifling, since shotgun barrels of the day didn't have anything for them to grip. Rather, they were a safety feature that helped the hollow slug collapse uniformly if accidentally fired through a choked barrel. The stabilisation method was the felt "feather" attached to the base. Another design introduced in the 1930s was the Foster slug, similar but featuring a heavy nose and light hollow skirt, being stabilised a little like a shuttlecock. Much later shotguns were produced with rifled barrels, and slugs designed to be fired from them with spin stabilisation. As these specialised "shotguns" were far more accurate, they also usually featured greatly improved sights. Today a third type of slug is available, the sabot slug. In this a genuinely solid bullet (usually .50" in calibre, but completely different in design to the .50 BMG) is carried down the barrel in a plastic sabot, in much the same way as the projectile in an APDS shell. These sabot slugs attain much higher muzzle velocities. The earliest ones, brought out in the late 1960s, were not very accurate but some today shoot under 4 minutes of arc—beginning to approach rifle accuracy.

Slug (Projectile)

See also