Hunting bullet families are optimized for hunting.
There are three categories of ballistics:
- interior ballistics – what the bullet does inside the barrel
- exterior ballistics – what the bullet does in flight
- terminal ballistics – what the bullet does after hitting the target animal
Anchor’s bullet engineering optimization for hunting bullets is prioritized:
- #1 terminal ballistics – top priority is to minimize wounded game, lost game, and tracking
- #2 exterior ballistics – without making undue tradeoffs to #1, optimize for low drag and great stability
- #3 interior ballistics – without making undue tradeoffs to #1 or #2, reduce engraving pressure and copper fouling
Other manufacturers seem to have optimized in different priority orders. But this is Anchor’s theory. Nothing matters much, if the bullet doesn’t put the animal down – and quickly. Wounded game, lost game, and game that gets tracked for hours or days, means a ruined hunt. That’s why terminal ballistics is #1 for Anchor. Then, that being achieved, the next most important thing is shot placement. Two key pieces of shot placement with which the bullet manufacturer can help are low drag and consistent drag. Our bullets are machined to the tightest tolerances on the market. Low drag means less time in flight, which means less drop and less wind drift. Consistent drag and other bullet characteristics mean tighter groups.
Anchor’s target bullet family is optimized #1 exterior ballistics, #2 interior ballistics. There is no terminal ballistics angle when shooting paper or steel.
Anchor offers three hunting bullet families and one competition target bullet family, each with a specific, different usage:
- Showcase – long-range hunting bullets optimized for reliable expansion. The Showcase bullet has an oversize hollow point, maximizing expansion. The Showcase bullet features an industry leading TrueHybrid tm ogive (patent pending) which resulted, on a caliber by caliber basis, from extensive Computation Fluid Dynamics analysis to select the absolutely optimal radii for the tangent portion and the secant portion. The secant ogive is long and sleek, to minimize drag. The tangent ogive has a much smaller radius, and makes the bullet far less sensitive to seating depth (and thus easier to tune during load development) than other existing bullets of any ogive configuration. The transition point between the secant and tangent portions of the ogive is set on a caliber by caliber basis, to ensure that the lands of the rifling never engrave the secant portion. The same level of CFD effort went into optimizing the boattail, which is a very important piece of a bullet’s drag and stability. This patent pending boattail design features a three angle profile, which enables a significant aerodynamic improvement over the standard single angle boattails of other bullets. In any given caliber, the ogive (and boattail) is identical across all available bullet weights. This means that once the reloader has set up the seating die to achieve the desired “jump”, the die can be left at that exact setting for all bullet weights.
- Reaper-X – short-range hunting bullets (under 250 yards) optimized for violent expansion and petaling of the ogive; the petals rip off in other directions, often at 90 degree angles, while the bullet shank pounds on through, breaking bones and wrecking organs, almost always with a complete pass through. The Reaper-X bullet has a double oversize hollow point with a fishmouth to initiate immediate expansion. The Reaper-X bullet has a tangent ogive, and shares the optimized boattail design of the Showcase bullet. Like the Showcase bullet, in any given caliber of Reaper-X bullet, all weights share identical ogives and boattails.
- Hardstop – a clever, non expanding bullet design. In large calibers, it has proven utterly lethal on dangerous game. And in small calibers, it is extremely effective for taking Tiny Ten antelopes and also small predators whose fur the hunter wants to avoid destroying. The Hardstop bullet shares the boattail design of the other families. Instead of an expanding hollow point, its “ogive” consists of a snout which is just narrow enough to avoid being engraved by the rifling lands, and a generally dish shaped meplat at the nose, which is designed to just “flare out” a little beyond bullet caliber, versus the Showcase and Reaper-X hollow points which expand rather extremely. This keeps the entire bullet together, for 100% weight retention, and avoids destroying the far side of a Tiny Ten animal or the far hide of a coyote or bobcat. With the Hardstop, the Tiny Ten hunter can use a favorite .243 rifle, for example, rather than lugging around a .375 H&H loaded with “solids”.
- Podium – a competition target bullet, not intended for hunting at all. It features a small meplat with no hollow point, the highly optimized boattail of the Showcase bullet, and a caliber by caliber optimized TrueHybrid ogive unique to the Podium bullet. The Target bullet shares the “same caliber, same ogive and boattail” brand promise to the reloader as all the hunting bullet families.
In all Anchor bullet families, the specific weights of bullet in any given caliber were selected according to the need to meet specified barrel twist rates, which are clearly identified on our product sheets. Where possible, all the “knobs” were turned to “maximum advantage” when performing this optimization, such as ogive length and groove count.
