Ballistic Coefficient vs. Accuracy?

[Distant Thunder]

Kurt,

My experience with money bullets is the same. Dan designed a bullet for my .44-100 Remington straight that I had at one time and of course it was a money design. Looking back at that bullet now I believe the only thing he got right was the length! I put a lot of time, powder and lead into trying to get that bullet to shoot and it NEVER did any good beyond 100 yards!

It would put 10 shots in less than an inch at 100 yards and i couldn't keep 5 shots on an 8 1/2 x 11 inch piece of paper at 220 yards, or sometimes, just barely.

The bullet Dan drew up for me had a long, slender, very pointed nose and to me at the time looked like it should shoot very well. I just didn't understand the transonic zone at the time, but now I do at least a little.

I've gone back and traced to "evolution" of Dan's money bullet. It started out as nothing more than the Metford bullet design when he started working with it. Then he tried to up the BC by shaving down the nose and making it longer. I believe that was a process that continued through at least a few steps and molds. Then the money design had some early success and everybody wanted one the mold makers began to turn out their versions of "THE MONEY BULLET". I think there was some attempts to almost compete for the pointiest Money bullet.

The crowd that builds a new rifle every year chasing the next new best bullet design, caliber or twist rate did as you say, they started to spin this design faster to get more Static stability and keep it from yawing excessively. So we moved to 16-twist .45s and now there is talk of trying 15-twist! All this is an effort shoot through the transonic zone with accuracy.

So we have two schools of thought just like the long-range precision shooters, those who try to spin their way through the transonic zone and those who try to do shoot through it by using bullet designs that opt for greater dynamic stability and just enough static stability to travel through and emerge still on course. You and I are in this second group and your experience and that boat anchor made of molds helps strengthen my thinking while paralleling my own limited experience. And that of other shooters I talk to.

While I favor the bullet design approach, as you do too, I do believe that both can work. You can probably, maybe even obviously, drive a very high BC bullet fast enough and spin it at a very high rpm and have success. The thing I was trying to make clear in my pervious post was that when you spin a bullet TOO fast you can lose dynamic stability and have your bullet NOT track on the trajectory path. When that happens it could fail under some conditions. That is the problem with pushing to the extremes, it can work, just not all the time.