Hi, everyone. Ron Spomer with the flattest shooting cartridge
in the world. Again? Didn't I just do that? Well, I did but we got such a great response
that we decided to investigate all of the cartridges. Not just ones I thought were probably going
to win. I was darn close but there's a new kid on
the block and this isn't it. Stay tuned. Part two, the world's flattest shooting cartridges. Caliber by caliber. Well, before we do the big reveal on this
cartridge and the winner of the flattest shooting cartridge. I would like to extend a thank you to our
patrons. If you would like to join the Ron Spomer Outdoors
Community, just go to www.patreon.com/RonSpomerOutdoors and join up. We sure appreciate it. Thanks. Now, this big guy is a .470 Nitro Express
and it's not going to win any flat shooting competitions. There's a big 400, 500 grain bullet usually
on top of these things. Fairly blunt and around nosed. Obviously, it's for close range shooting of
a really dangerous game like Cape Buffalo but it had the right idea with a lot of powder. Well, they needed that powder to push that
big bullet. When the turn of the century is when they
started figuring out that you could bottleneck your cartridges and throw smaller bullets
with the big powder you were using behind the straight wall cartridges. Once they figured that out and put in smokeless
powder, there went our velocities. So, how do we get our velocities at their
peak? You push a tiny bullet with a lot of powder
and this leads to barrel burnout. If you want to go fast, you've got to burn
a lot of powder and in relation to the diameter of your bore, and that's going to burn out
the throats sooner than if you had a more, even one like this. So, the slower cartridges are going to have
longer barrel life, but by golly, if you want to go fast, you've got to pay the price. So, that's your price. Burning a lot of powder and burning out your
barrel sooner. But it's like I always tell guys for hunting,
it's not really much of a concern. Let's say that you've got a real barrel burner
and your accuracy starts to go too far south after a thousand rounds. Well, if you're a conservative shooter and
you're only using this rifle for hunting. Let's say you're an aggressive hunter with
lots of time and money and you take 10 big game animals a year. And if you require two shots to do it, you're
going to be able to bag about 450 to 500 animals, depending on how many sighting shots you take
and stuff. Before you burn up a thousand rounds, you've
got a good 40, 45, 50 years of hunting under your belt. I don't think you need to worry about burning
out your barrel in a hunting rifle but here's the way we are going to look at finding the
fastest shooting cartridge of all time. It leads up to this time and that is caliber
by caliber. That gives us a good feel for how the smaller
calibers compete with the bigger ones and where that sweet spot is in the middle. And it really is in the middle. So. Let's start with the .17 caliber. That's going to be one. Buy the cartridge that throws the bullet the
fastest in .17 caliber. It's the 17 Remington. And we'll put up our chart here for you and
show you some numbers. I'm not going to recite all of them but you
will notice as we go down the caliber line from the 17s, all the way up to the 338s,
it's always the cartridge that is the fastest that wins each category. Now, you can modify it a little bit by choosing
the BC of your bullet because as you'll see when you look at these charts and by the way,
if you want to really study these, go to www.RonSpomerOutdoors.com. I have a companion piece on my website that
covers all of this stuff and I've got this chart on there. So, you can take your time, study it, print
it off if you want and really look at those numbers and start to understand the relationship
between muzzle velocity and ballistic coefficient on your bullets because there's some kind
of a balance going on in there. And generally, the lighter the bullet in the
caliber and the faster you push it, the flatter it shoots to 500 yards, 300 yards, sometimes
but rarely a thousand yards. After 500 yards, it appears that you need
to move up in bullet weight and get a higher BC. And then that starts to take over to be a
flatter shooter at extended ranges. I haven't found out the exact formula for
it yet but I invite you to send one in if you know it. If there's some kind of a magical mathematical
formula that calculates exactly the right BC bullet weight and velocity for the flattest
trajectory in any cartridge, that would be fun to know. Be a useful little formula. So, in the .20 calibers, the winner is the
.204 Ruger. In the .22 caliber, a lot of people thought
it would be the .22-50 Remington because it's so fast and flat and well-known but the little
bit lesser known .220 Swift has more powder capacity. You can see it right there. That's why it wins. It's pushing the same bullets but faster. And it's still one of the fastest in the world
and we'll see that as we get to the end of our list here. Next up are the .24 calibers and everybody
was thinking .243 Winchester, maybe six millimeter Remington, which is faster than the .243 but
there's a faster .24. Not a lot of people know it, whether it be
.240 Weatherby Magnum that throws them the fastest. So, it wins. It's the flattest shooter. Then we step up to the .25s and a lot of people
thought 25/6, which is the great guess but again, here comes Weatherby. Their old belted magnum case is doing the
job. .257 Weatherby Magnum is the flattest in the
.25s, but not quite the flattest of all. After .25, we step up to .26 and here we're
going to have a bit of a gap in here because I don't have this cartridge. Wish I did but a good substitute right now
is the 26 Nosler. This is about second place. There's a cartridge that's a little bit longer
and just as fat. And that is our all time winner, I think. At least it is in the 27s and it is the 6.5x300
Weatherby. And why don't I have one? First, because it's really, really new and
I just haven't gotten around to playing around with one. And I'm probably not going to have it myself
anyway because that's just going so fast. I really don't find a need for it. But boy, if you want to set some records,
that's the one you want to look at. Now, why did I slide this guy in here? Because this is the 300 Weatherby Magnum. So, that lets you see how much taller that
thing is. And if you neck that 300 down to 6.5 and use
the same bullets as this 26 Nosler, you get little bit more speed out of it and that really
shoots flat. You look at that chart. 6.5x300 Weatherby Magnum, a hundred grain
bullet drops only 11.7 inches at 300 yards, 37 inches at 500 yards, 218 at a thousand
yards. So, far that looks like it's winning in all
categories. Pretty impressive stuff. I wish I had one to show you but take my word
for it. It looks just like that. I believe just neck down to 6.5. Now, the next one up is a 27 Nosler. Several people guessed that might win. And by golly, in the 27 category, it does. And once more, it's just because it's got
more powder, capacity and it pushes those bullets the fastest of all the 27s. The 28s and we come up with, could it be the
28 Nosler? Not quite. It's the 7mm Remington Ultra Magnum. Once again, bigger, longer cartridge. All of the Noslers with that big 404 Jeffrey
Case that they're using, those are all pushed back to be 30/0 links. So, you can fit them through most standard
length actions. Remington went with the ultimate. I think this is why they called it the Remington
Ultra Magnum because they've got full length magnum sized cases. The 375 H&H full length case. And you generally need a magnum length magazine,
if not action to function those. Now, Remington's Model 700 will handle it
with the right magazine length in it. So, that's seven RUM wins the category for
28s and it's probably pretty close to winning it all. But before we do that, let's look at the 300s. And then again, everybody... It's surprisingly... This is really a surprise but several people
said 308. 308 Winchester. Guys, that's at the bottom of the heap. That's a great all round cartridge with minimal
recoil and they build accurate rounds for it and all the rest of it. But it's not that flat shooting. It just doesn't have the horsepower. The 30/6 beats it. The 300 H&H Magnum, the 300 Win Mag. The 300 Ruger Compact Magnum. The 300 Weatherby Mag. Oh my gosh, you just got so many that are
faster than the 308, but even the 300 Weatherby Magnum's not going to win this category. You've got, once again, get up into those
RUMs. And the 300 Remington Ultra Magnum is doing
awfully well. 12.12 inches of drop at 300 yards, 38.7 at
500 and only 228 at a thousand. That guy is in and running. Now, there are so many of these that I had
to go to the back page with a few. We're going to jump up to the big 338s and
such. And you know, I didn't do a lot with the 338s
because when I started researching them, I could see that they did not have enough horsepower
to push even their light bullets, fast enough to win the fastest cartridges in the world. And then you get up to the 35s and the 375s
and you're getting up into some real specialty categories in order to win this one. So, you can look at the numbers there on the
338, 378 Weatherby Magnum but not going to be your all around champ. That's going to be this guy neck down to 6.5. That's a 6.5x300 Weatherby Magnum. Now, that .220 Swift comes at 300 yards within
1/10th of an inch of that 6.5x300. Pretty impressive. There's some really interesting data on these
charts. So, once again, go to www.RonSpomerOutdoors.com
and study that chart and see if you can figure out that relationship between BC and muzzle
velocity. It's some kind of a magical formula out there
but it's fun to just go through all the ballistic charts and figure this stuff out and discover
just how flat shooting some of our surprising little cartridges are and how many of them
are so close. And again, I am not emphasizing or even suggesting
that we all buy the flattest shooting cartridge in the world and go hunting at extreme distances. This is just an exercise in the best. Everybody likes the world's record this and
the world's record that. It's fun to find out. So, we'll do some more world record searching
on cartridge performance here in the future. But it's always fun to argue with your friends
around the campfire, "What's the flattest shooting cartridge?" "It's mine." "It's yours." Well, now you've got the answer and you've
got some numbers to prove it too. Do be aware though, that you could find one
that maybe shoots a little flatter if you get the right combination of lightweight bullet
and maximum velocity. I didn't find any but it wouldn't surprise
me if there are some options out there. I'm thinking of that in the sevens. If you went down to a hundred grain bullet
in that RUM, you might come pretty close to winning this as the all around flattest shooter. I don't know how effective a hundred grain
bullet would be out of a seven RUM. It would certainly put a hurt on something
but it's getting to be a pretty frangible bullet at those high velocities. And they don't load them anyway, so you'd
have to be a hand loader. So, that's pretty much the wrap-up on this,
guys. Now, if you want to write back and argue with
me, I'll be happy to entertain the numbers. So, just come up with some good solid numbers
that is run on a good ballistic calculator. Make sure you use your BC numbers and all
the rest. Oh, be aware of that BC numbers are not absolute. When you study these hand loading manuals
and even the charts from the factory loaded ammunition and they list their velocity at
the muzzle and all the rest of it and usually the bullet BC, none of those numbers are cast
in stone. They may have come up with them in their labs
but when you look at the hand loading manuals, for instance, you may have the same load or
the same bullet and cartridge combination in one manual that's 100 to as much as 200
feet per second slower than the top one in another. So, it depends on the barrel and the length
of the barrel, the tightness of the chamber and the bore. And just a lot of factors that play into it. So, don't assume that you are going to get
these same ballistic performances from your rifle. You've got to always check this stuff out
with a chronograph or on the range and shooting your targets. But it's fun to know which one am I going
to shoot the fastest. Now, you get to make a decision. You want a lot of recoil and shoot fast and
hard? Do you want less recoil and shoot fast and
reach out there? Or do you want to save your barrel and just
said, "Maybe, I'll just live with a little bit more reasonable velocity," because as
many point, out gravity is a constant. It pulls at 32 feet per second, accelerating
at 32 feet per second. So, you can count on that and figure out your
ballistic curve and compensate, especially when you have a laser range finder and you
know the precise distance of the target. What you can't compensate for is wind. You can guess at the wind speed and wind direction
but over distance, is it going to be the same wind speed? Is it going to be constant? Is it going to be gusting just when you pull
the trigger? You can make a lot of mistakes with wind. So, most long range shooters these days are
spending more time working with high BC bullets than flat trajectories. Both are great, but if I had to pick one over
the other, I'm going to go with a higher BC bullet so I can fight to wind more effectively. This is Ron Spomer. Thanks for watching guys and gals, if I can
call you gals in this day and age. Anyone who appreciates guns and ammo and ballistics
and hunting, I thank you for watching. Until next time on Honest and Shoot Straight.
