Strange thing about meat damage with one cartridge over another. If you shoot a deer in the butt with a 308 and in the lungs with a 243, the 308 will damage more meat. Then if you shoot a deer in the butt with a 243 and the lungs with the 308, the 243 will damage more meat! Funny how that works. If you shoot the deer in the butt with a 308 and a monolithic bullet and take the same shot with an SST, I'm reasonably sure the SST is gonna ruin more meat. But bullet placement is the key. Shoot both bullet's through the rib cage of the deer and neither will do a lot of damage to anything you might want to eat! Problem I have with bullet's with plastic tip's. I think they ar designed to give better BC and thus better long range performance. Problem with that is that very very few people shoot long enough to use the difference and maybe fewer still have the ability to place the bullet that well at say 500 yds plus! So what you end up with it taking a shot at 100 yds with a bullet designed to work well at 500+ yds and shooting into something you might want to eat and blowing it to h*ll! That tip not only increases BC but also must go somewhere and that some where is right back into the bullet and I'd think will expand the bullet more violently. Two places I like plastic tip's. Varmint bullet's and monolithic bullets. They explode thing's when I use 75 gr V-Max bullet's in my 243, absolutely explode! With a monolithic bullet My understanding it they ensure the bullet expands. I shot some Sierra match kings into newspaper years ago, HP bullet's. Dug them out and they had closed up the HP and the bullet's bent, not a good thing in a hunting bullet. Add the plastic tip and they will open every time. Lead core bullet just might open to fast and damage thing's you'd rather not damage.
