Neanderpundit

no, I did not say a bullet. Where was I? Oh, yes.

If you shoot a cartridge- say, like a steel cased Silver Bear 7.62 x 39 that you happen to have had stuck in a target, and you manage to hit the primer, from, say, 50 yards distant, with a really accurate match rifle, it does not explode, as you’d think it would, it merely blows the primer out, and the powder burns as it exits the primer holes, and the bullet might try to move out of the case a bit, and the exiting gasses push it forward kind of like the round from a Gyrojet. And the end result looks like this:

Also: High desnity polyurethane foam is a GREAT target base for 22’s. You can shot the hell out of it, and it sort of self-heals up to a point. Not cheap, but if you can lay your hands on some surplus stuff like I did, free, you can stretch it out on your target uprights and staple or pin targets to it easily.

Update- We have a ruling:
”

A cartridge is the whole kit and caboodle – case, powder, primer, bullet. Technically, you take a 120mm tank round, that’s a cartridge. Take a semi-separate loading round like the 105mm artillery rounds, and those are cartridges, too.

Shell, like clip, has morphed over time. While the M1 Garand and the WWII GI are where clip morphed into magazine, artillery is where shell morphed into cartridge…

Originally, it applied to explosive artillery rounds. “Shot and shell.” Where shot was solid, and shell’s exploded.

Then we developed breechloading guns that used cartridges, but because they fired shells… the terms morphed, just like clip meaning magazine, and for the same reason, really.”