why is 308 popular and 30-06 a boomer round? what made 308 the better choice for militarys and most hunting rifles? just cheaper to produce?
why is 308 popular and 30-06 a boomer round? what made 308 the better choice for militarys and most hunting rifles?
.308 feeds better in semiautos and is basically just as good as .30-06 unless you need bullets over 180 grains (which you don't) so society has settled on .308 as being the all-purpose 30 caliber rifle round.
tl;dr: .308 is 30-06 but better for everyone except re-loaders, or folks whos only guns are chambered in 30-06.
For most shooters the .308 is going to do everything they'd need a 30-06 to do. Ballistically, your average 30-06 and .308 rounds are almost identical. The greater case capacity makes 30-06 much more flexible for reloaders, but most shooters aren't reloaders. .308 is lighter and gives you the same performance, not by a lot but in bulk it makes a difference and that's important to militaries. Also .308 is shorter and thereby allows for a shorter action in any gun that is chambered for it, which also translates into weight savings; again, not a lot but enough to be of significance to militaries and anyone looking at these things in bulk. On top of that, shorter and lighter also mean less materials to produce; and that is significant to militaries especially in wartime conditions.
Does anyone have a .30 cal cartridge that has .308 power in a shorter case? Like a case almost as short as 7.62x39?
>what made 308 the better choice for militarys and most hunting rifles?
It's shorter, so it can fit in a standard length action. That also makes the ammo lighter for essentially identical performance.
I don't know of any off the top of my head, though there are many .30 cal cartridges which are the same length as a .308 but more powerful, like the .300 WSM, .300 Ruger compact magnum, Lazzeroni Patriot, .300 Remington Short Action Ultra Magnum, etc.
you can kind of get close with grendel, but not really. long range performance is comparable but .308 uses a heavier projectile. do with that what you will.
>Like a case almost as short as 7.62x39?
You could probably load 7.62x45 that hot.
Thanks for the answers anons, I was genuinely curious.
.30-06 Springfield was downloaded at some early point (creating M2 Ball), because they realized it was actually reaching further than the one shooting range the US Army was using at the time, they decided it would be a cheaper solution than rebuilding and extending the range (they didn't have a lot of money at the time).
M2 Ball is just about 100fps away from the later 7.62x51mm NATO cartridge. The move to go for a shorter cartridge, based on the .300 Savage, but for the same kind of performance, was mainly motivated by the fact that a shorter action would be easier for making an automatic rifle action that takes detachable magazines over a fixed magazine using en-bloc clips. The ultimate weight savings are just a small bonus in this equation.
This was probably part of the whole M14 thing, where a lot of the things on the M14 is very similar to the M1, but revamped and redone to make them more efficient and perfected. This is why very few parts and little tooling interchanges between the M1 and M14, but it can be questioned just how worthwhile this was, because the M14 took quite a lot of time and money to develop and for production to be set up, and production was extremely slow for a while.
Meanwhile in Italy, Beretta and Breda had already produced the M1 under license for years, and they decide "Hey, Tone, so what if we just convert-a the M1 as is to use-a the detachable e-magazines, and e-the new 7.62mm NATO cartridge?" and they do just that. The resulting BM59 is not strictly as 'efficient' in every single metric as the M14, but it's ultimately an extremely usable rifle which took a lot less money and time to develop, and which could be rolled out pretty quickly for how much M1 tooling and parts could be reused. The BM59 also has a pretty good compensator on it which makes it a lot easier to control in rapid fire and full-auto than the M14, where they end up blocking the fire selectors on most of them.
The BM59 is often argued to be a better rifle.
M2 ball was not downloaded. They switched back to a less aerodynamic bullet to reduce range.
It was absolutely downloaded, .30-06 does not have all that added case capacity for no good reason.
M2 ball has both a higher velocity and pressure compared to M1 ball. There was no downloading.
The case capacity is because older powders from when it was being developed were not as efficient.
I have a feeling you may be right, but can you source it?
No, the M1 rifle didn't even exist yet by the time M2 Ball was devised.
Read the ammunition TMs for the operating pressures and velocities. Or just look at wikipedia.
>.30-06 Springfield was downloaded at some early point
it was a pretty late point. a year or so after equipping all their soldiers with the Garand, the US discovered that the garand operating rods were bending. the cheapest fix was to download the m1 ball about 10% and use the reserves of older cartridges for machine guns. they compensated for the loss of muzzle velocity by using a more aerodynamic bullet design. this is why commercial 30-06 is more powerful than the military load - the commercial load is the original WW1 pressure. if you look in reloading manuals there will be a separate set of reduced-pressure loads for the M1 Garand.
Wrong on just about every count.
The short answer is basically the reason 9mm is more popular than .357 Sig/mag. There's just not a lot of applications where you need the extra power of '06. Plus the as others have pointed out .308 is shorter so is easier to design autos for.
Except the power gap between .308 and .308 longfudd is literally negligible compared to 9mm and .357 sig/mag,
I'll also add that the main benefit of the extra power of 30-06 is that it has a flatter trajectory than .308. So for hunting the main reason you'd use it would be if you're planning on making a long range shot.
Complete fuddlore. I've said it time and time again there is NO reason to get a .308 longfudd. It can't do anything that a .308 can't and if you want a significant, meaningful step up in trajectory and power, get a .300 WM.
The .30-06's power advantage over the .308 is very small. Any shot you could take with the '06 you could also take with the .308.
If you do need more power than .308 and you're willing to take on a magnum length action then it would be silly to switch to .30-06 compared to something like .300 win mag, which offers a substantial increase in power.
Also, don't forget that .308 bolties come in nice, handy short actions and maneuverable 20" barrels. A .308 longfudd literally has the same action length as a .300 WM but nowhere near the performance of one. Boomers simply never recovered from the introduction of the .308. The fact that a shorter, more efficient cartridge is capable of yielding the same terminal performance as their glorified "muh fought against the nazis" cartridge has fried all the synapses in their brains.
.308 boomers never recovered from the introduction of the 5.56
Wdym, I think .223 is a great little cartridge, but it just doesn't compete in the same class as .308.
What does the .308 do better again to justify the increased recoil and bullet weight/lower ammo count?
In combat situations? It‘s better suited for long range and machine guns. But I was talking about hunting. You can take every game animal in North American or Europe with a .308. With .223 you‘ve got an excellent coyote and varmint round. Also great for smaller deer species. Both are superb rounds in my opinion and I dislike the false dichotomy of saying one is better than the other, let alone that one should be replaced by the other.
This, neither is a bad round, one is not better than the other generally speaking (what does that even mean?). They're different tools for different jobs.
>A .308 longfudd literally has the same action length as a .300 WM but nowhere near the performance of one
Yes, that was my point. If you're going to lug around a magnum length action you might as well get magnum performance out of it.
And if someone popularized .308 AI type shoulder angle, .308 would out perform .30-06
Down here in outer benisville Australia, 30-06 wasn't ever really very popular with old timey shooters, we had buckets of cheap 303 which was sort of the default big boy cartridge for most people sort of in between WW1 and about 1970. After Vietnam though, most of the guns in 303 just were not being made any more, the ones floating around were a bit clapped out and if you wanted a new gun, 308 was sort of the practical, off the shelf choice which got you a shiny shooting iron, lots of ammo and by about the mid 80's milsurp 303 was drying up to the point it was very scarce in some places.
Rather than deal with the problem of fixing old gats and finding or reloading old shells, people just sort of migrated the path of least resistance. Plus there was sort of other options like 243 and 270 which also were and still are popular cartridges for deer, roos and pigs
I don't think 30-06 or 303 were bad cartridges, but over time you just got better guns in newer cartridges that caused most to migrate away from them
>ywn get to massacre roos or emus
why even live bros....
Don't know if you're allowed to shoot emus, think you can if you're an aboriginal or have them farm grown
I sat down and did the whole course on kangaroo culling, where you've got to shoot them, bullet weight minimum (its basically 556 or bigger and shoot them in them in the head) and disposing of them, in the past I've shot a few of them but while the meat is really lean good quality that goes well in stir fry or marinades for the bbq, no one really wants to eat it much, the skins are excellent when tanned. Very tough and long lasting leather.
We sort of had a problem with dickheads gut-shooting and torturing roos so they sort of had to bring some laws in similar to when you hunt deer to keep the riff raff away, I'll get a job once in a while to deal with them but for the most part I'm ok to live and let live with them. The 303 SMLE shot a lot of roos in this country though, I think ever WW2 vet had one or two squirreled away in their cupboard that they never turned in after the war 🙂
Can the 06 penetrate a near peer's chest plate? NO
Can a .308? NO
Can a 5.56? NO but you can shoot more bullets for less recoil with the same flat trajectory
There is a reason why militaries moved away from battle rifles. Your garbage cartridge is obsolete.
.30-06 only becomes a better round than .308 when you’re firing180 grain+ bullet weights. But if you need a 180 grain .30 caliber bullet, it just makes more sense to go up to .300 win mag. .30-06 is in a funny overlap area between .308 and .300 win mag. With that being said, interestingly .30-06 is still very popular in Europe as a hunting round. Mainly because it fits in the same sized actions that the popular (over there) 8.57, 7x64, 9.3x62 cartridges fit into.
>.30-06 is only better with heavier bullets.
.30-06 is better with all bullet weights. Whether or not it's enough better to make a difference is up to the shooter. Another 100 fps with a 168 grain TTSX makes sense to me. Sure, you could get a magnum, but why deal with the extra recoil and muzzle blast? Hell, why not get a .300 wsm?
Or people could stop arguing about min-maxing their hunting rifles. A .30-06 is, what, half a pound heavier than an equivalent .308 rifle? Who cares? I'd personally have one converted to .35 Whelen but .30-06 will most certainly work.
.308 is basically .30-06 improved.
>TLDR
powder loads. basically the same, but now both are much hotter than their originals.
Modern .308 V modern 30-06, 30-0g only pushes the same bullet 75-125fps faster.