I'll Get Right On That

I made the mistake of noticing that M1903 ball outranges M2 ball using GURPS: Gun Stats on the SJ Forum.

I have been taken to task for not citing my sources and allegedly using the bullet manufacturer's stats for ammunition.

Bitch, please.

The bullet makers don't publish the length of their projectiles anywhere I've found.

Gun geeks do.

But I have books with Army test data listed.  Books that I didn't bother getting out again because I don't really feel like I need to defend my doctoral thesis on a game forum when I don't even get a degree from it.

Besides, do I really need to cite specific tests when, no shit, the entire world abandoned round nose bullets for spitzer rounds in a very short time frame?

The US, after spending all that time stealing adapting the Mauser design to our way of doing things and chambering it for what amounted to a +P version of the M1892 ball, abandoned the M1903 ball round and rechambered EVERYTHING in M1906 ball.

The .30-03 and .30-06 are not interchangeable rounds either.

This was on top of having just reworked all the rifles in inventory to accept a real bayonet just the year before.

The ever frugal US Army wouldn't have proceeded on a change of cartridge and rechambering their rifles if the performance improvement wasn't blatantly obvious.

As I said, when the French secret was out, nobody said, "we'll just stick with the proven, heavier, round-nose bullets."

That's a big enough indicator that we don't need to dig up obscure Army test data and cite the exact weather conditions of the tests.

Another clue is nobody makes round-nose rounds for cartridges that don't use a tube magazine outside a few historical freaks doing recreations of period pieces. 

PS: GURPS has official stats for the Balle M, D and N with various time period versions of the Lebel!

Balle M (1886) is from Adventure Guns with 6d+2 pi, 800/3,300.
Balle D (1898) is from Pulp Guns with 6d+2 pi, 1,000/4,200.
Balle N (1932) is from High Tech with 6d pi, 900/3,900.

Balle M is a flat-nosed round, Balle D is the spitzer.  Balle N serves as an example of what happens when you make the bullet heavier, but can't increase the chamber pressure so you lose velocity because you also lost case capacity with that longer bullet intruding into the case further; but notice it still outperforms Balle M on range!

It's from wikipedia, but it's a handy comparison:

Gun Stats doesn't account for the difference in ballistic coefficient between round nose and spitzer, and boat-tails.