WB
I remember that nutty gunwriter....
Wednesday, January 09, 2019, 08:14

With sweaty palms I waited monthly and read those articles. Thankfully I was naive and believed everything I read. It was a joyous blissful time.

The idea was to make a .577 Nitro bolt gun. But the .577 Smokeless, in reality, was almost always held in complete emergency reserve and seldom used. The .577 (BP) Express had some validity in a 10 lb. double but the performance was not in the same ballpark. The big problem was, as you said, vicious recoil even to the seasoned big rifle shooter, plain dangerous. A detached retina is a more plausible and serious effect in my opinion. A 15 lb. gun is truly needed and that would be unmanageable. It all hearkens to the emergency 4-bore BP guns that themselves trace to the water-fowling "Punt" cannons never intended to be shoulder fired. Someone's wild idea that didn't pan out in reality but they did it anyway. The .577 Nitro actually evolved from the military .577 Snyder when transitioning to smokeless powder and comparatively very high pressures. True bore size is between 28 and 20 gauge!

To my reckoning, and from my limited experience, the varied .50's are about all that can be practically managed and truly effective. The .500 Nitro, .500 Jeffery, .505 Gibbs, filled the bill, worked, were proven. The efforts to push it further lost effectiveness and efficiency. IT is arguable if an animal can tell the difference from the .450's and .475's but some with experience do have opinions. But there is a tipping point.