My New Pet Varminting Load: MV 4650 fps!, BC 0.221!

I suspect that ever since the first nimrod discovered that it was possible to contain the explosion of blackpowder behind a rock in a wooden tube in order to project that rock with significant velocity in the general direction of some sort of target, one and all of his intellectual descendents has had one goal – more velocity! I will not fully address the velocity-versus-momentum argument here; rather, I will settle it with the following statement: So long as bullet terminal performance is adequate to the task, increased velocity is the proven solution for all real-world applications (some of those applications require limited velocity only because it has been proven impossible to make any bullet perform correctly with higher impact velocities); meanwhile, for the varmint hunter, velocity is king.

What we tend to forget when discussing or considering the muzzle velocity potential of various loads is the efficiency of the bullet at retaining velocity – Ballistic Coefficient (BC). So long as any selection of bullet types share the same diameter, nose and base profiles, BC is a linear function of mass. For any given type of bullet construction (materials and design) there also exists a practical minimum bullet mass for each caliber where bearing surface is sufficient to assure accuracy – it is infeasible to retain identical nose and tail profiles when bullet mass drops below a certain threshold. This is why the plastic tipped bullet design has changed varminting, it allows for significantly lighter bullets in each caliber to retain optimum nose profiles for a high BC. At the same time, it allows manufacturers to use one bullet instead of two for each basic design – the plastic tip encourages rapid expansion despite a relatively heavy jacket so the manufacturer can beef up jacket thickness (so the manufacturer found it useful (or necessary)