This is easy! Will shooting be at distances more than 600m if yes go with the 30-06 so you can push VLD bullets fast enough to stay above transonic out to the range you intend to shoot at. In the 308 Win you have to really work to select a powder, primer,brass and VLD that will remain stable out to 1000m+. BC alone is not enough because not all VLD remain stable as they lose velocity and transition to transonic flight and slower. I grew up shooting Palma and High Power and it is not as easy as some would make you believe with regard to the 308Win and long range shooting.
Get a barrel in 1:8 or 1:9 twist anything slower and your living 3 decades in the past and need to catch up! This will allow you launch anything you like even the insane 230gr VLD's and stablize them although I doubt they would leaving very fast! LOL 172gr-190gr will likely be where you find your sweet spot. I have ran into guys in F-Class shooting 30-06AI with 210gr. VLD's from long 28-32 inch barrels. I am not a fan of anything AI though stepping up to something closer to a 300Win mag or hotter makes more sense for 210gr-230gr VLD's.
I have a rifle with a #3 countour 28" finished length and 1:8 in 30-06 and for anything 800m or less I basically see similar results on game as I see with my 300 Win mag. I have not tried shooting it in competition though. When I know I will be 600m or less I love shooting 190gr.-200gr hunting bullets it is devastating on large game. Traditionally 308-30-06, 30-06 to 300Win Mag, 300Win Mag to 300WBY Mag depending on powder used you normally see a 20%-30% improvement in velocity and improved ballistics, PBR, drop, windage, etc.....The amount of powder needed for each jump up in performance keeps increasing too and barrel life get's shorter with each jump.
I could be wrong in this next part but I think more companies make match brass for 308Win than 30-06. I have never even looked at premium brass for 30-06.
To be honest unless I was restricted to a 30Cal I would be looking at 6.5 and 7mm cartridges for target shooting. You do not need to look at trendy or exotics in short magnums or true magnums either. 6.5-06 is great and you could use a variety of '06 based brass for it and if you did need to have head stamp match you can get 6.5-06 A-Square brass. The Remington 260 and 7mm-08 are great cartridges and are better at almost everything than the parent cartridge 308 Win. like wise 280/7mm-6/7mm Remington express are non magnums that perform very well based on the '06 brass.
No the problem is not spring movement. The problem with all dual opposed locking lug actions is once the firing pin spring is compressed you end up with about 20lbs. of force trying to torque the lugs. No amount of lapping will solve this either. The only true solution is to double sleeve the bolt not the action 99.999% of people get this wrong no amount of external sleeving of the action can solve this and increasing bedding area is likewise meaningless. You basically add metal to the bolt and machine it into an elliptical shape or barrel shape and use the full length of the bolt as the load bearing camming surface so the lugs have zero load on them when in battery. I have posted on this before. No shortage of idiots parroting misinformation or things that from a machine standpoint are impossible or do not matter and have no basis in fundamental engineering. You would not believe how many young engineers today completely mis-understand why some things are done.
Oh and no amount of blue printing of an action solves this on dual opposed locking lug designs the only way around it is to double sleeve the bolt and machine it to act as the load bearing caming surface. This is what Savage attempts to do with their extra floating lugs and I have not once heard anyone get this bit right on the internet or in a magazine! Just like a barrel nut is not mostly about head spacing that is just a happy side affect of looking at cost reduction. Machine time cost money and every time you have to repeat an operation or tighten up on tolerance stacking it cost money. The interface between the receiver face and barrel shoulder is more important than anything else for repeat accurate shots notice I said repeat shots for a single cold bore shot it does not matter as much. By eliminating the shoulder you no longer need to worry about 2 surfaces being precise and you do not need to worry as much about tolerance stacking either in this area. So this means the receiver face does not need to be machined as precisely and the barrel shoulder that no longer exists does not need to be as precise and these two surfaces that traditional interact with each other are now eliminated from the accuracy of the rifle. This means the equipment used to machine the receiver and barrels can be much cheaper and older in design and used for far longer between re-zero and re-tooling. It also means that you never need to remove a barrel in production to shorten a tenon, change the shoulder or ream additionally once the barrel is mounted. If you eliminate iron sights you also remove any need to time the threads to present sights in proper alignment to shooter. If the receiver face, secondary torque shoulder(Mauser Like Actions) and barrel mating surfaces are not true to each other you get stress loading of the barrel and action and repeat shots will be affected especially long rapid strings. It can affect single shot cold bore shots too but not as much as repeat shots.
In a manufacturing situation making things that thread together concentrically is much easier to do that locating a hole with precision and machining parts plumb and concentric in relationship to each other and getting to mating surfaces that torque together and fit true under load just add's more cost and complexity to the manufacturing operation.
So becasue the engineer that designed the Savage 110 understood what was truly important and how to eliminate the importance they also lowered production cost with out affecting accuracy potential. Savages reputation as a barrel manufacture and the reason they where so much more accurate out of the box for such a long time has nothing to do with the quality of their barrels. In fact Savage has traditionally had some of the worst barrels on the market but because of the above issues that all the other OEM's had to contend with being eliminated from the design it allowed them to be very accurate in spite of their barrels looking like they were rifled with a chain saw under inspection with a bore-scope. When people mention the quality of the barrel on their accurate Savage it your first sign that person is clueless about why the Savage action design and what is contributing to the accuracy of their rifle.
Now that more and more of the old machines in OEM factories are being replaced with CNC machining and CHF is replacing button rifling more and more very cheap designs are shooting sub-moa with factory ammo out of the box. On traditional designs with a shoulder the most likely culprit if your rifle does not shoot sub-moa right out of the box or the groups open up rather quickly under rapid firing is the interface between the barrel and action.
CHF is not the fastest or cheapest method of rifling either button rifling is much faster and cheaper. What CHF is faster at is producing a finished barrel in one operation with modern rotary hammer forging. If the mandrels are kept clean and in spec. you can form the rifling, the chamber and the finished external profile in one operation with "ZERO" chance of the chamber, throat and rifling not being concentric, not being the proper dimensions or depth in relationship to each other. You also almost eliminate any chance that the rifling, chamber or throat will have smears and need lapping or polishing or re-machining. In CHF the most important thing is keeping the mandrels clean and replacing the tooling as it wears. It makes it impossible to have a barrel that is not fully centered and impossible to have a badly cut chamber or throat. There will be no visible machine marks inside a CHF barrel if the OEM is doing a good job it will look like a mirror when you look down the bore with the naked eye. With a button rifled barrel or cut rifled a cartridge that would give 5000 rounds of accurate fire between replacements like the 308 Win or 7,62x51 will now get 20,000 rounds of accurate fire. That is why the Army Sniper Weapon Systems went to CHF 5R designs because the new specification required 20K rounds of accurate fire from the 7,62x51 chambered rifles and that could only be accomplished with CHF barrels.
The problem is that factories seldom have the highest standards and tooling cost money so they seldom maintain the tooling as it would need to be to produce anything like a match grade barrel. Cleanliness is hard to maintain in older factories and again costs money. That said we have the best OEM barrels in the history of mass produced rifles. We also are getting more and more precision machined parts and better surface finishes where it counts. Sadly we are also getting more cast and MIM parts. We are also seeing the cosmetic surface finishes at an all time low and are getting too much plastic especially when talking about bottom metal. It is also not high grade plastic is very cheap flimsy plastic. Not all plastic is cheap and flimsy.
). My whole point is that one has the potential to out perform the other. There are many other factors to take in, and yes a guy with a .308 can compete against others with more ballistically superior cartridges...just harder to do. Last time I shot a match I had an Army issued rifle shooting issued ammo (1moa accurate), on bipod & rear bag, and with a 10x scope. The guy next to me was shooting open class and had a custom 6.5 SAUM firing high BC Cauterucio bullets, with 32x NXS scope, and a F class front rest. I felt a little out of place, he even kind of snickered at my equipment. I had fun and still placed well. Just go have fun with it.
