Missteps in Cartridge Design

No one would deny that the 6.5 Creedmoor, designed by Hornady, with rifles initially made by Ruger, is not one of the great combinations to come down the pike in recent years. No one can predict the future, but barring some cataclysm, it seems destined to become as much a fixture on the shooting scene as the .270 Winchester.

- Terry Wieland

There is nothing particularly new about the Creedmoor’s cartridge design itself. It’s really good, but then, so were a number of other cartridges introduced since 1935 that, for reasons unrelated to their own basic value, fell flat. The .244 Remington is an example. Then there were others that did pretty well, but did so in spite of obstacles that were placed in their path, and really could have done much better, such as the .250-3000 (aka .250 Savage).

The gun business is an odd one in that manufacturers of different essential parts rely on each other utterly, yet there seems to be remarkably little collaboration, or even consultation. It’s as if the car business had one company building chassis, another building engines and a third producing different kinds of fuel, yet rarely trying to make sure the engines would fit the chassis and the fuel would work in the engine.

Most of us grew up with Remington and Winchester producing both rifles and ammunition, and it always seemed to be the natural order of things. Historically, however, it’s an anomaly. Rifle and ammunition companies are usually independent of each other. Anyway, the evidence seems to be that even when they were joined together, the ammunition side and the rifle side did not seem to confer very much.

To take the 6.5 Creedmoor as an example of how it should be done, there are a half-dozen factors that all have an impact on a cartridge’s performance: caliber, bullet weight, powder capacity, maximum overall cartridge length, barrel length and rifling twist. Hornady and Ruger studied every one of these and made their decisions accordingly.