I’m aware of the NCIS scenes, what else you guys got?
Just because a plate stopped a bullet, doesn’t mean the plate then distributed that force evenly across it’s whole surface. The bulge on the back side of an impacted plate doesn’t form gently.
To add to your point, trauma pads exist to help mitigate this. Blunt force trauma is no joke.
Backface soft armor also catches spall, which can be very dangerous itself. Even ceramic plates can have a danger of ceramic shards. I believe modern ESAPIs, XSAPIs, and such modern plates are designed stand alone, but original SAPIs carried a warning that their rating was only in conjunction with soft armor.
Maybe on a plate from 1965 that is just a sheet of steel inside cloth. Modern ceramic plates spread the energy of the impact.
Here’s a video of a Level IV plate taking a 30.06 AP round followed by like 6 5.56 AP rounds and a 7.62x54R AP round so powerful it jammed the rifle.
There’s no significant plate bulge even after all of that.
I would just like to note that they were shooting at 2 separate plates here, and only shot each plate once with the grade of ammo at which they were rated. The first plate they did shoot with 5 smaller rounds after they hit it with the larger one, but they didn’t shoot both of those larger rounds at the same plate.
Those “smaller rounds” were extremely hot 5.56 rounds - an upgraded version of the rounds the guy above me is saying fires through brick walls and cracks ribs if it hits armor.
