Re: Rebated Boat Tail Bullets
The truth is your talking nonsense! Not only are RBT advantageous, so much so the principle tooling manufacturer for swaging dies only makes BT dies to special request.
D.R. Corbin, President
July 5, 1986
(Refer to Dr. A.B. Bailey, "An Aerodynamic Study of the Lapua Step Boat-tail Rifle Bullet and its
Ballistics", 1981, Endrickvale, Fintry by Glasgow, Scotland, to R.H. Kent, "The Theory of the Motion of a
Bullet About Its Center of Gravity in Dense Media, with Applications to Bullet Design", January 1957,
Ballistic Research Laboratories, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, USA, and to D.L. Walters, "Crosswind
Weighting Functions for Direct-Fire Projectiles" (Report X-65), August 1975, Atmospheric Sciences
Laboratory, US Army Electronics Command, White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, USA, for background
and mathematical support of the summary presented here.)
When a flat base bullet flys through the air at any velocity, it displaces an equal volume of air which
then rushes in behind the passing bullet to fill the vaccuum. This happens at any velocity. But at speeds
below Mach I (speed of sound), the drag caused by this turbulence is greater than most of the other forces
slowing down the bullet. When the sound barrier is crossed, the air is compressed faster than it can move
out of the way, and it compacts into a dense wave that is dragged along by the nose of the bullet. Moving
this compressed shock wave adsorbs far more energy than the turbulent base drag. Thus, at super-sonic
speeds, the nose shape has a greater effect than the base shape on the total retardation of the bullet (as a
percentage of total drag).
If the base of the bullet were made more streamlined, then the air would be put back together more
smoothly, with less turbulence, and would fill the space left by the passing bullet more quickly. This would
eliminate much of the base drag. Putting a point on both ends of the bullet accomplishes this, but it generally
makes the bullet too long, so that it takes up too much powder space or causes other physical problems
in a practical size cartridge case or gun. There is no technical reason why a double-ended bullet should not
be used to overcome drag, except for these physical considerations.
The next best idea is to use a truncated conical shape on the base, so that the bullet has some
degree of streamlining to help reduce base turbulence. The conventional boattail does this reasonably well.
By having a base that is made of an angled portion of the shank, the size of the flat base is reduced so that
the turbulence works on a smaller area. A typical, practical size of boattail has from nine to fifteen degrees
(measured from the center-line of the bullet) and is about a caliber long. There is no great difference in the
performance of any specific angle or length within this general range.
The boattail reduces base drag at all velocities, but has the greatest percentage of effect when the
bullet is flying at sub-sonic velocity. Thus, it is more important for slow bullets, or bullets fired at long
ranges, than for bullets which will be moving at super-sonic speed over their entire path to the target.
Ideally, pistol bullets should be boattails. However, due to the length and weight limitations imposed on
most pistol bullets, this superior design is rarely used for handguns. It is often applied to rifle designs where
it will have relatively little effect, but is primarily effective for promotional purposes.