How could or should the 6.5 mm Grendel be improved?

[LRRPF52]

If Guardsman made a mistake, it was in coming onto the 6.5 Grendel forum and asking how to improve upon 6.5 Grendel. It's usually a waste of time to ask people who are emotionally and/or financially invested in their pet cartridge for ideas on how to make it better. They tend to think it's great just the way it is. (And that reaction isn't limited to this forum.)

I seem to remember a forum member coming into this discussion several years ago suggesting that the Grendel case be slightly lengthened, and case capacity increased, with a slightly larger receiver set to get a little more performance out of it. Remember who that was?


Yeah: ME. After I stopped stabbing in the dark, and ran the numbers, I saw that there was no real benefit to going that route, especially after seeing that the Grendel case can already serve as a basis for pushing those velocities, but again, 200fps is not a significant velocity increase with high BC 6.5 projectiles. Run the numbers on a 16" barrel and a 24" barrel and see how miniscule the downrange performance differences are.

It's also interesting to see that Bill was asked to supply AR15 Grendels with the Wolf 123gr Soft Point, which is one of the worst bullets you could possibly use to demonstrate the capabilities of the 6.5 Grendel, and totally inappropriate for a military demonstration of course.