What is the highest pressure pistol cartridge and how high can we make a pistol cartridges go?

Over the last couple of hundred years pistol performance has increased by increasing the pressure of the cartridge. A typical .45 cartridge is over double the pressure of a black powder gun, and 9mm is 50% higher than the .45 ACP. This is one of the reasons that modern pistol bullets can be smaller yet more effective.

However, aside from some flirting with +P and +P+ pressure ammo no one seems to be designing pistol hardware to handle even higher pressures. Why? Wouldn't a 55 gr .22 caliber bullet flying at 3,000 fps out of a pistol be just as deadly as a 5.56 NATO out of a AR-15 platform?

We have newer alloys than we did 100 years ago. We should be able to make barrels that can hold higher pressures.

 

What makes you think that?
S&W took the brute force approach with .460 revolver at 65,000 ppsi.
Colt adapted an existing design for 9x23 W at 55,000 ppsi.
Brno 7.5 FK is "only" 50,570 ppsi but does a lot.

 

You can shoot 5.56 NATO out of a “pistol.” Granted it probably won’t be traveling at 3,000fps due to barrel length or rather the lack thereof, but it’ll be plenty deadly. It also has great recoil, muzzle blast, and the pistol firing it will be of necessity rather bulky, to accommodate the size of the rounds, which are, after all, rifle rounds. If you want 3000fps/55gr, the case is going to look a lot more like a 5.56 than a 9mm. And a round that big requires a gun to shoot it, which won’t be very pistol-like.

 

Indeed we do, and indeed we have. See the FN Five-seveN and Ruger 57. ~50,000 PSI chamber pressure in a standard duty size pistol.

 

Impressive ballistics with this one. Crazy expensive platform!

 

Why can’t I have a 3 pound gun with a 6” barrel that shoots a 500 grain bullet at 3,500 FPS and no recoil?

I think laws of physics come into play here somewhere

 

There will come a point where as redneck2 says "I think laws of physics come into play here somewhere" and you will have a hard time keeping the gun from whacking you
in the forehead or flying out of you hand. I am sure there are a few YouTube videos showing this.

 

https://www.thehighroad.org/index.php?threads/highest-pressure.501613/

 

Encore pistol will handle nearly anything you ask it to do. There are other specialty pistols shooting rifle ammo. Savage Stryker, Remington xp100, newer pistols by CVA.

S&W x frame pistol calibers all apply here. 460, 480, 500 are all high pressure in a more “handgun” format. Hard to control those, and significant recoil. For a smaller more controllable round try 327fed. Ruger is still basically the only one in the 327 game but others have tried and backed away.

It seems notable to mention the action types of most pistols. The browning tilting barrel design is not exactly the strongest thing in existence. It works well, but would need a major overhaul for super high pressure rounds. The main issue is in eating up recoil energy on the slide to keep the slide or frame from breaking and being a catastrophic failure. There is only so much room for travel, so spring space is limited. If spring space is limited then springs have to be stiff which makes for difficult operation. Again, this needs to be totally revamped for high pressure rounds. Any reasonable fix would be larger and heavier.

 

+P+ has no maximum pressure, it starts right past +P and goes all the way to kaboom.

+P also isn’t a pressure, what +P means in psi or cup isn’t the same across the board.



Out of these a pistol in 257 Roberts would be the highest pressure.

 

The 9x23 (great, great round...to bad it's so hard to find a gun chambered for it...) runs at 55,000 PSI out of a 'standard' handgun, as Jim mentioned earlier. Not sure anything else runs more out of a 1911 or similar platform?

Larry

 

There is the 9X23 in a 1911. = 55,000 psi.

 

Playing that game, what does a 460 Rowland do out of a Glock 21?

 

If you are using traditional brass cartridges then you are limited to about 65,000-70,000 psi simply due to the fact that above that pressure cartridge brass starts to flow fairly significantly. Full hard 260 cartridge brass has a yield strength of ~67-78 KSI. So if you exceed that pressure the cartridge will start to flow into places like ejectors holes/slots, extractor pockets and the small gap between chamber wall and the breach face depending on actions. Exceed it by a large enough margin and you simply extrude the brass through these areas until you have a rupture even if the rest of the gun's action is strong enough to otherwise withstand the pressures and the forces they generate.

This is part of the the reason the various cartridges being proposed for the NGSW (Next Generation Squad Weapon) program of the Army has all moved away from brass cartridges and are using hybrid cartridges that in most cases have steel in the case head to support pressures that are going north of 70,000 psi.

 

It's a point of diminishing returns
Take 38 acp, 38 super and 9x23 all basically the same case capacity
Going from 26k to 36k gains nearly the same as going from 36k to 55k.

Still I wonder what pressure it would take to burst the cylinder on my buckeye sports Blackhawk with the 32 H&R cylinder.

 

Don't know if it's been mentioned or not but small diameter, very high velocity handgun bullets is not necessarily a new concept, but maybe hampered by market demand or economics, I don't know. Jeff Cooper wrote this in the early 1970's in "Cooper on Handguns":

"What I'm getting around to is that, by means of this system (referencing the gas-operated Husqvarna pistol), we might come up with a .17-caliber pistol firing a 25-grain spitzer at 3300 fps, and that, amigos pistoleros, might well revise our ideas about pistolcraft. Think upon it".

 

What game?

 

Don't overlook powder capacity. Generating big pressure requires more powder. so the case will need to be either bigger around or longer, or both. A big cartridge case means in-the-handle magazines won't work- too big to grip properly. So you're left with what we have already, big revolvers or AR type pistols.

 

Wrong. You can get more pressure simply by adding more powder to the same case.

 

Agree, but is it usable pressure? I'm thinking of pressure spike; pressure that can be contained and used, vs just kabooming the gun. I think you have to slow the burn rate, deflagration vs detonation, so a larger case.

 

Yes, it's usable. Example, 9mm, 9mm +P, 9mm +P+. Each of these add pressure and velocity. And even with the same 9mm Luger case, there is 9 Major. And there are other 9mm-length rounds that produce even faster speeds, such as the 356 TSW (50,000 psi) than produces 357 SIG?Magnum velocities. Slower powders are used but the performance is very high. Good chamber support is best, but the guns don't explode. The concern is whether they have sufficient case support to prevent a case blowout. But a case blowout is different than a burst barrel.

 

Still in agreement, but the OP is talking significantly higher velocities than those. I don't think you can get 3000fps from a 9mm case, no matter how you stuff it. I'm no expert though.

 

Correct the energy extracted from propellent is not indicated by peak pressure but the integral of the pressure over the bullet's travel down the barrel. So if we have a given cartridge/gun loaded both with a fast powder and a slow powder both reaching the same peak pressure the slower powder will usually result in higher velocity due to the higher average pressure over the trip down the barrel. The problem is these slower burning powders are almost always bulkier (lower density) and thus required larger case volumes to be used effectively. So yes abstractly if you increase peak pressure it can give you better velocity but only if you have the case volume to take advantage of it.

IE 5.7 vs 5.56 both can use the same bullets and even if we limit both to the same peak pressure the 5.56 will have the ability to outperform the 5.7 cartridge due to the ability to use larger volumes of slower powders. This will make it less efficient in it's use of powder in some cases but it will always be able to out perform the 5.7.

 

I know this is a rifle round in a pistol but here is what will happen. You all have probably seen this before.



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