Ballistic Coefficient (BC) - How important is it?

[speedengineer]

I recently made a table summarizing the ballistic performance of different weight/bc bullets in .264 caliber. Thought I'd share, since it seems relevant to this topic. My take away is that, if you're in the realm of decent BC, there isn't enough difference in ballistic performance to justify selecting a bullet with inferior terminal ballistics. I'm not going to be shooting out to 1000 yards where the real differences begin to show up. At 500 (or even 750) or less, all the 6.5 PRC bullet options in my list perform basically equally from a trajectory standpoint.

I also included a couple 30-06 comparisons with good and poor BC as a side comparison for my father. Wow, just goes to show that if you are NOT in the realm of decent BC, then you will not have acceptable long range ballistic performance....

 

[Rich Coyle]

speedengineer,

Interesting.

 

[speedengineer]

And, some more info to go with the image I attached 2 posts above...

For long range hunting, wind uncertainty will probably be the biggest range limiter for responsible hunting, ya? Let's pretend for some particular animal you're hunting, you'll only take a shot if you have less than +/- 5 inches of impact uncertainty from your point of aim due to wind - aka a 10" kill zone, and ignoring all other uncertainties and you have 0moa shooter accuracy... Furthermore, say you can make your wind call accurate to +/- 5mph (with a 90 degree cross wind which is the worst case scenario).

The maximum range you can take a shot and know you'll hit your 10" target, provided the above conditions, for the trajectories of the bullets previously posted are:
Federal TA - 505yd
Hammer Hunter - 515yd
ABLR - 535yd
ELDx- 535yd
EOL- 540 yd

ELDm - 560yd (not a real hunting bullet?)
30-06 High BC - 465yd
30-06 Low BC - 375yd

So yes, higher BC buys you a little bit of extra yardage, but not much. It seems like you want to stay above a BC of 0.500, and then just select the bullet that shoots most accurately in your rifle, and has the terminal performance that you think meets your requirements.

 

[dfanonymous]

It's as I said on the first page. The BC does not give you better wind deflection, it just gets the bullet down range faster for longer, faster cartridge will extend you out even more. I don't touch eth ics on here, but since there are people who do make successful shots at well beyond 800y....you're going to want more BC for this "actual" long range hunting. It's merely about keeping things as closer to center as possible in the scope and retained energy at distance. BC isn't a free pass to not learn how to dope the wind better than 1 mph. There's really no way to skate past that besides doing the work.