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Barrel Length, Twist Rate and Subsonic Bullet Myths

2 Responses to “News you can use”

  1. Lyle Says:

    Most of those things have been well known for a long time. BPCR competitors can do amazing things at amazing distances with heavy, slow bullets having highly arched trajectories. It’s that we (as a society) tend to forget these things, and then when we re-learn them we make the mistake of believing them to be “new” discoveries. The ultra fast twists I haven’t heard about until fairly recently though. That may actually be new.

    As indicated in the piece, you can only spin a bullet so fast before it lets go, unless it’s built for it. (your Dremel tool, with no load on it, tops out at between 20K and 30K RPM, whereas a typical 223 bullet from a typical rifle at 3,000 fps is turning at around 300K RPM). I’d like to know what Joe Huffman has to say about this. IIRC, he’s spoken in the past about “over stabilization”; a concept apparently not envisioned by the author of the piece. It was not my understanding that faster is always better so long as the bullet can hold together.

  2. Jeffrey Acheson Says:

    The bigger omission of the piece is it basically only applies to known distance ranges or short ranges. Barrel length and muzzle velocity don’t matter on a known distance range. Provided that you know the range well (or are at close range), it’s just a matter of using the right hold. But you will not know the range hunting or in combat. You will guess and probably suck at it unless you bring a rangefinder. Which is why modern militaries have all gone away from stubby full bore intermediate cartridges (like 8mm Kurz or 7.62×39) to reduced caliber flat shooting cartridges like 5.56 and 5.45.

Remember, I do this to entertain me, not you.

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