Well, I don't know about hunting with them since up this way handgun hunting just doesn't happen because of the firearms laws. Besides which I'm not a hunter either.
But a few rounds of .460 with a nice "flashy" powder charge sure does do a nice job of finishing up a fun time at the range. Gives a guy a real hankering for some blue rare beef for dinner too....
DWfan, I hear you on the difference in test information found in the various manuals. That's why I like to quote the book I'm using. As you suggest the length of the test barrels used for each set of results matters so much that such figures are useless for anything other than direct comparisons within one book's data table and even just for one caliber at that. As such I only consider the loading table velocity numbers as guidelines for comparison within the one book. And in fact I broke my own rule because I used a Wiki source for the 7.62x25 ammo velocity to compare to the .357 data from my Lyman book. My bad....
As I understand such things the handgun bullets drop off faster due to the typically terrible ballistics coefficient found with handgun bullets. They are ALL just way too short and stubby to achieve a good BC value.
Now if someone were to mess around with a wildcat cartrige to use for long range handgun shooting and feels that the vast plethora of such things out there already aren't quite enough
then taking something like a .44Mag and necking it down to accept a .308 spitzer rifle round would be the way to go. With the necking dimension from .429 to .308 and if the neck was tapered as shallowly as possible it SHOULD work with a revolver chamber.
But then this is where the TRUE long range handguns shine since they use bolt or break actions which can easily contain the most radically necked ammo to be found.
Now none of this should prevent us casual plinkers from enjoying the challenge of hitting gongs at 100 or 200 yards with our regular handguns. It just means we need to "rainbow" them in with lots of holdover. But when we manage to get 6 hits in a row we can stand tall and brag until our shooting buddy's want to tie and gag us and leave us in a dark corner....