Long-action vs. short-action
In the first half of the 20th century, the practice of civilian sportsmen experimenting and modifying existing cartridges to suit different ballistic needs, known as "
wildcatting", really took off, and the result was the number of newly available cartridges exploded from a couple of dozen to well over one hundred. Having dozens of different cartridges all with unique dimensions was a headache for rifle manufacturers, and still wanting to reach the widest consumer market possible, they had to find a way to economically produce rifles that could be adapted to accept every chambering on the market. While barrels could be custom-made affordably,
actions required more time, complex
machining, and were thus expensive to make, so it made sense to produce the rifle action's dimensions so that a few standardized lengths could reliably use most (if not all) of the cartridges on the market. The so-called "standard length" cartridges are traditional rifle cartridges with a cartridge overall length (COL) between , which is best exemplified by the
.30-06 Springfield. Most of today's long-action cartridges had their cases designed around .30-06 Springfield's case dimensions, such as the
.270 Winchester,
.280 Remington,
.35 Whelen,
.264 Winchester Magnum, and
7mm Remington Magnum, as well as much newer cartridges like the
.26 Nosler and
.28 Nosler. The
.308 Winchester debuted in 1952 and its militarized version, the
7.62×51mm NATO, was adopted by the
U.S. military in 1954 for the new
M14 rifle. By the 1960s, it had displaced the .30-06 Springfield as the popular cartridge in both the hunting fields and in the battlefields. With a much shorter COL of and using the improved
propellants available in the 1950s, it could do nearly everything traditional military rifle cartridges did, such as the .30-06 Springfield, but was cheaper to make, lighter in weight, more compact in size, and had lower recoil energy. More importantly, while the .30-06 has produced roughly a dozen
wildcat cartridges, only the
.270 Winchester and the
.25-06 Remington enjoyed widespread commercial support; in contrast, the .308 Winchester served as the parent case for the wildcat
.243 Winchester,
.260 Remington,
7mm-08 Remington,
.338 Federal, and
.358 Winchester, all five of which are used by hunters to this day. The result was a new series of
short-action cartridges, typically with a COL between , that tend to use bullets of different calibers, rather than using a wide variety of the same caliber to achieve the same ballistic effect. == Characteristics ==