I can’t see how a Hydro would even remotely perform like an expanding bullet, but I would believe that their terminal ballistics would favor straight line penetration due to their concave “flat” nose design.

I will be using hydros on my next buffalo hunt and am very curious as to whether they offer any significant real world advantage over a flat nose monomtal such as a Barnes banded solid. In any event, I don’t use traditional ‘solids”, i.e. round nose copper clad steel cased lead bullets. My PH showed me a handful of these taditional solids that came apart, riveted, bent, and otherwise acted like errant children. The buffalo/elephant/hippo that these miscreant bullets were retrieved from all died anyway, lest the misbehaving bullets would never have been recovered, so failure in these cases is fodder for endless debate. I myself will stick with monometal solids to ensure that those bullets don’t misbehave.

Of the 7 solids I drove into my cape buffalo, only one was recovered buried deep in the soggy grass of the stomach after driving through the dewlap, heart/lungs. All the rest were passthroughs. I was using 570 grain flat nose banded solids.