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It is keyholing. It happens when as you can see the bullet loses stability and tumbles in the air before hitting the paper sideways. It can be caused by many things. Insufficient rifling twist for the length of the bullet being used is one of them. The bullet hitting the ground or something else before hitting the target is another possibility.
Either way, it isn't a desirable thing and indicates that something is wrong. The fact that the PLA members are proudly posting pictures of a bunch of keyholes randomly splattered all over a target like that suggests that they think this is normal and that therefore they don't know what they're doing.
The term "keyholing" is also sometimes erroneously used to refer to when two bullet holes are touching on paper.
Could keyholing of ... seemingly this magnitude... be the result of basically laughably bad tolerances in internal barrel width, or perhaps the barrels are made of some kind of alloy that expands significantly from heat?
I have only ever seen keyholing in western gun videos from basically burn downs... but even then after a barrel is nearing its end of life by manufacturer specs, its more common to get some kind of failure to feed, significantly decreased precision and only occasional keyholes.
Maybe another possibility is similarly poor quality alloy of some kind used in the cartridge itself?
Combination of all of these things?
I remember seeing a fairly recent video of some kind of PLA MOUT type urban course... and you could see massive keyholing on targets that were like 5 to 10 meters away.
The prevalence of it baffles me. Ive personally dealt with and seen misfires and jams of various kinds at ranges, but I've never even seen a keyhole occur in real life.
5.56 (especially M855 for some reason) also exhibits ‘fleet yaw’ for the first couple of yards when fired. Factory new barrels and ammo doesn’t matter, iirc something about the rapid application of rotational force from rifling and projectile construction
Fleet yaw is a different phenomenon that impacts terminal ballistic performance. It's essentially a way of describing why some projectiles tumble and fragment after impact while others will tend to remain more stable and pass straight through for longer.
The projectile AoA being described in that context is only a couple of degrees. It's enough to change how the round behaves after hitting something, but it's not the type of in-flight wild tumbling that results in keyholing on a target.
This is an important clarification, you’re right. The yaw angle is minimal in ballistic flight, the level of keyholeing in the photo is rather dramatic. Though the 5.8x42mm is standard with a mild steel penetrator like M855, and the round was definitely built with cost as a major factor - maybe a bad lot of ammo?