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New Shooter New Gun Caliber question

Yeah, if you are looking to shoot longer range, I would go with a longer barrel in the 24" or 26" length and add a suppressor to that. When I said SPS, I meant the basic SPS, not the TAC.
 
awesome. thanks for the advice. is there any advantage or disadvantage to the size of actions other than the pro and cons of the certain bullets each can use?

Action length is generally determined by the cartridge. 300winmag and 300RUM definitely need a long-action. Whereas the 300wsm, although designed for short-actions, can be built on a long-action if you want. (I am unaware of a factory rifle in 300wsm on a long-action)

Here are some scenarios for you illustrating 'action issues'....

Suppose you have a 300RUM. You would build it on a long-action. If you want to feed rounds from a magazine, your cartridge-overall-length (COAL) is constrained by the size of your magazine. If you don't mine the rifle being a single-shot, then you can seat the bullets out farther. This will give you more case capacity and theoretically more velocity.

Now suppose a 300wsm. Built for a short action, the same magazine vs. single shot issue apply just as above. Alternatively though, you can build a 300wsm on a long-action. This means you can seat the bullets waaaaaaaaay out giving you maximum case capacity AND they will still fit in the magazine.

One of the driving factors on whether or not to go with mag-length vs. single-shot is the bullet. Big bullets tend to take up a lot of space in the case when seated to mag length. Whereas if you seat them out farther, you're limited to a single-shot but you should be able to get more velocity.

Always remember that although high-velocity is nice, it's accuracy that puts the bullets in the intended target.

Hope all that makes sense.
 
After re-reading my last post, let me expand a bit on the single-shot vs. repeater.

If you're building a dedicated longrange hunting rig, generally speaking, having a single-shot rifle is fine. My 300RUM was built as a single-shot (because I seated the bullets so far out). Having it as a single-shot worked just fine because everything I shot went bang-flop with one shot but also, if a follow-up was necessary, I always kept an extra round right next to the rifle. I could shoot round #1, eject the round, drop round #2 into the action and close the bolt without having to take my head off the gun and lose sight picture and cheekweld.

Alternatively, http://www.longrangehunting.com/forums/f53/my-260-mcr-59628/index8.html was originally built as a single-shot but I converted it to a detachable box magazine (DBM) as the rifle became more of a tactical competition rig. This meant that I became constrained to a COAL of 2.85" in order to fit into the mag. It caused some loss in velocity, but not accuracy. And accuracy is the key. Speed is nice, but all that speed doesn't matter if you cannot say where the bullet is going when you pull the trigger.
 
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