mcb
Member
This is totally a half baked thesis for a thread (social distancing induced cabin-fever is effecting my brain I think) and will likely crash and burn for not being thought out. Shoot it down if you want...
Why do we discuss barrel length without taking caliber into account? The big boys do. You rarely see the barrel length of a 105mm or 120mm or 5-inch gun given in a length (meters or feet etc) Pretty much all of the big-guns barrel lengths are given in calibers. The length is reports as a number that is how many times will the diameter of the projectile divides into the length of the barrel. ie the American Abrams use a version of the Rheinmetall Rh-120 with a 44 caliber barrel length while the Leopard 2 uses a 55 caliber barrel length of the same gun. This way of designation barrel length goes back to the time of the early breach loading black powder guns IIRC.
I think from a reloader's point of view it makes more sense to think of barrels like this. If you did it routinely I think selecting burn rates of powders and evaluating potential velocity losts and gains due to changes in barrel length would be come a bit more intuitive. A 20-inch 223 barrel is ~89 calibers long but a 20-inch 308 barrel is only ~65 calibers long and a 20-inch 45o BM barrel is only ~44 calibers long.
I need to spend some time in Quickloads and see if this correlates with anything... Anyone else think like this or see any good articles/research along this line of thinking?
Why do we discuss barrel length without taking caliber into account? The big boys do. You rarely see the barrel length of a 105mm or 120mm or 5-inch gun given in a length (meters or feet etc) Pretty much all of the big-guns barrel lengths are given in calibers. The length is reports as a number that is how many times will the diameter of the projectile divides into the length of the barrel. ie the American Abrams use a version of the Rheinmetall Rh-120 with a 44 caliber barrel length while the Leopard 2 uses a 55 caliber barrel length of the same gun. This way of designation barrel length goes back to the time of the early breach loading black powder guns IIRC.
I think from a reloader's point of view it makes more sense to think of barrels like this. If you did it routinely I think selecting burn rates of powders and evaluating potential velocity losts and gains due to changes in barrel length would be come a bit more intuitive. A 20-inch 223 barrel is ~89 calibers long but a 20-inch 308 barrel is only ~65 calibers long and a 20-inch 45o BM barrel is only ~44 calibers long.
I need to spend some time in Quickloads and see if this correlates with anything... Anyone else think like this or see any good articles/research along this line of thinking?