# Pre/early war intermediate cartridge shootout



## gjs238 (Jul 18, 2010)

What's best?

7.92x33mm Kurz
.276 Pedersen
6.5x55mm

I'm thinking of early or pre-war intermediate cartridges that the US could have adopted prior to entering war.
I'm not including .280 British and 7.62x39mm because they arrived too late.

I'm also thinking that adoption of such a cartridge could have changed much that followed.
Perhaps there would have never been a 7.62x51mm NATO, 5.56x45mm NATO, and current discussions of reversing direction and moving to a larger cartridge.


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## Shortround6 (Jul 18, 2010)

They don't quite do the same thing.

The 6.5mm Swede was about the same size as a 7.9 Mauser except for the bullet diameter. No saving in weight of ammo or size of rifle. And with a 140 grain bullet at over 2600fps the difference in recoil between it and a 30-06 M2 ball load wasn't enough to get real excited about. 

The .276 Pedersen was a bit smaller but with a case length of 51mm (the same as a 7.62 NATO) it was about half way in between the 30-06 and the 7.92x33mm Kurz. 

It was probably the best of the three.


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## norab (Jul 22, 2010)

The answer to what's best depends very much on what the cartridge is exected to do. the 7.92 X33 was designed to be used for close to intermediate range ground combat in a large capacity magazine to reduce recoil and overall weight. The other two rounds were designed to be full size all range combat rifle rounds. It'a an apple and orange argument. Of the
.276 and 6.5 the .276 would have a slim advantage because of the .284 bullet diameter's better ballistic coefficient. The .276 would have been adopted except that it didn't make economic sense with the millions of rounds of .30-06 ammunition already in the supply system.

By .280 I'm assuming you mean the .280 round used in the postwar EM-2 rifles and not the much older .280 Ross another British round

"Introduced in the Mk 11 action in 1907 as a sporting round, the .280 Ross is a large semi-rimmed case, bigger and longer than the 7mm Remington Magnum that it preceded by over 60 years. The actual caliber of the projectile is .289" 
The original factory loads were a pointed FMJ 180 grain target round at 2800 fps, and a 146 grain bronze point type spitzer hunting bullet at 3100 fps. This was in 1907 remember, before the word Magnum had been co-opted by the shooting fraternity, and without the advantage of modern slow burning powders. The .280 Ross is not far behind the performance of the excellent 7mm Remington Magnum."


A bit wordy but I hope this helps


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