
Subs are not a good idea if you want to recover the animal easily. I have to agree with most of the posts here. I've never been shy about going on record that I find the 300Whisper/Blackout to be a waste of good rifles. It's not THAT much louder to run super-sonic stuff, especially in a large bore like 458Socom or 338Fed. Otherwise, throw a can on a super sonic rifle and call it good. If you're hunting in a place where you have to be super quiet, and you have the money to set up a rifle for subsonic work, then knock yourself out. For a sub-sonic round, that "long enough range" is a heck of a lot closer than for a cartridge leaving the barrel at Mach 2.5-3. At long enough ranges, being wrong by 3yrds might mean an additional foot of drop, and a complete miss if my laser and my eye didn't get the number right. I generally limit my effective range for hunting at a point where I can be off by 5yrds on my estimation and still connect.

Comparatively, a 30-06 drops that much at about 400yrds. For example - I used to have a 458Socom that would drop 30" at 250yrds below a 100yrd zero. There's nothing I like more than holding way over the target and throwing 200-500grns after game, because I know it's going to hit like a train when it lands.īut, there's a distinct reality in the trajectory disadvantage. Bullet momentum means a LOT more than kinetic energy, and throwing big pills at game is a great way to put a hole in them. I'm a guy that has hunted a lot with "big and slow bullets," whether in leverguns or revolvers, as well as tinkering with them in subsonic loadings. So if you survive those consequences, then the ballistics are the next determinant factor for me. There just aren't that many bullets on the market made to expand at super slow velocities. Often, the heavier pills in a given caliber are designed around "standard" or "magnum" cartridges, such that they are NOT designed to expand at sub-sonic velocities. Bullet design for short ogive "fat" bullets made for sub-sonic work means crappy BC's, relatively.Chamber throat and magazine length limitations can steal a lot of powder capacity from a round.A 150grn 300Blk at 2000fps needs a different twist than a 230grn pill at 1,000fps. It's REALLY hard to have your cake and eat it to. Twist rates for "standard loads" are different than that of twist rates for sub-sonic loads.

These are a few things that you have to live with, even before the bullet gets out of the muzzle: The larger problem that I have found with sub-sonic ammo isn't about what the ballistic tables say - it's about the physical limitations of the rifles and cartridges themselves.
