Aguila 45 ACP IQ Hyper Velocity Ammo

Found this too...

~~~~~
This ammo is brand new on the market. This ammo has a special 117 grain intelligent bullet, which travels at 1450 FPS. This new line of ammunition is loaded with the first intelligent bullet, made of an alloy (no lead) with a low specific weight. This feature allows light bullets like these to have a size similar to those projectiles made from lead. These are called intelligent bullets because they recognize the hardness of the target at the moment the projectile hits it, and in nanoseconds the projectile configures accordingly. Thus, if the target is very hard, the IQ bullet will have superior penetration while maintaining its weight and size. If the target is soft like ballistic gelatin, it will not overpenetrate, transferring all the energy into the soft target, and breaking apart into three or four sharp fragments, each creating independent wound channels. Two additional features that make this high performance ammunition unique is that they can be fired in any firearm made for the corresponding caliber, without any modification to the firearm, and recoil is substantially less than when shooting regular ammunition. The IQ line of ammunition was specially developed with personal defense and law enforcement applications in mind and it is also suitable for hunting.
~~~~~

mike

I have gone through 50 rounds of the stuff. It is louder than any other .45 I have shot, loud enough to scare the other shooters on the firing line when I first cap off a round or two. Plus, it produces a monstrous muzzle flash that can be quite warming on a cool winter day and quite illuminating at night like a flash from a camera. It makes the flash from a 230 gr hydrashok look like a few sparks.

I have seen various reviews on the net that either suggest this to be a good defensive ammo, or because it breaks up, to be a poor performer as the individual pieces often don't penetrate too deeply.

It is a hoot to shoot. Buy some and see for yourself. However, I don't think I would consider this to be some sort of great defense round until some other poor saps have actually used it in that manner. I would hate to be the poor sap who used it on a bad guy who was wearing a heavy down coat and then find out that the IQ has trouble penetrating heavy and soft layers. In other words, I am not willing to use it defensively as long as I have any other options available to me, such as plain ball ammo even. At least I know what it is and is not capable of doing. As for the IQ, I really have no idea what it is truly capable of doing or not.

Here is a testing of the ammo that I had found previously. This appears to be the same as the IQ ammo, only it was previously called "High Power". Note that the weights of the rounds are the same and the ammo is reported to break apart in the same manner. In these tests, penetration of the fragments ranged from 3.5" to 9.9 for .45 acp. Considering that gelatin tests are often gracious in the amount of penetration they indicate, it would seem that this ammo could quite likely result in some bad cases of failure to stop.

Maybe another way of characterizing the performance would be to compare the fragments against .25 acp. Somewhere I read that .25 acp has about a 6-7" average penetration in gelatin. So, one aguila IQ round would be like shooting somebody 4 times with the underpowered .25 acp. The average penetration of the 4 fragments in four different tests ranged between 6.3 and 7.3 inches. That is not too great. For some of the fat guys I see shooting, that amount of penetration wouldn't even make it through their belly fat! So then you would have a really big and pissed of guy with little or no real injury to his fighting ability.

I will stick with Hydrashok. http://www.firearmstactical.com/tacticalbriefs/volume3/number2/article2.htm