Thread: 0.577 Rifle!

Originally Posted by jaegerhund

Justin

Interesting note: a higher grain 30-06 round with a typical rifle has around 20 ft-lb of recoil energy which is considered at the edge of comfortable shooting -- I think this thing has around 150 or so ft-lb of recoil energy.

I have no idea how it stacks up to muzzleloaders or black powder guns in general but do to the lower pressure loads and lower velocities for a given grain round in such guns I think the recoil would be less.

I think the recoil of a 12 gauge (typical) is above 50 ft-lb --- so that might help in comparison

There's more to recoil than recoil energy. Recoil velocity is also a major part of it, as is simply the noise - cartridges with louder higher-frequency reports "kick" harder because your brain mixes the pain from the noise and the pain in your shoulder. IME most flinching problems are primarily noise-related.

I've got a 12 ga and a .375 H&H Magnum (usually considered the minimum elephant/dangerous game cartridge) and a .577 muzzleloader. The .375 kicks about like the 12ga with standard loads, but the .375 has to get sighted in from a shooting bench or a prone position, which hurts. But if you can handle the recoil it's a great deer rifle because it will drop them in their tracks without damaging the meat. I bought mine from a professional hunter (he did culling for the game management areas) who was upgrading to a 376 Steyr for the lighter carrying weight.

The muzzleloader kicks the hardest by far, though - I only fire it standing up, and I enjoy shooting it. The one time I let my wife shoot it she reacted about like the guy in that video, and she's got a reasonable amount of experience with firearms. Again, the recoil from the muzzleloader is relatively slow, but it's a hard shove that goes on and on (38" barrel I believe). The bullets I'm shooting weigh about 500 gr, and with 130gr of FFg gunpowder underneath it's moving along pretty smartly. I haven't chronographed mine, but others have reported similar loads at about 1400-1500fps. Recoil energy is (bullet mass x bullet velocity^2) + (powder mass x powder velocity^2) - both are heavy so it adds up to quite a lot.