14.5×114mm

The 14.5×114mm is a Soviet heavy anti-materiel cartridge developed in 1939 for the PTRD and PTRS anti-tank rifles that armed Red Army infantry against German armour during the Second World War. As tank armour grew too thick for a rifle-fired round to defeat, the cartridge found a second life in a heavy machine gun rather than fading out with the rifles it was designed for: it became the basis of the belt-fed KPV, which in turn arms the ZPU family of towed and vehicle-mounted anti-aircraft guns and serves as the main armament of Soviet-lineage armoured personnel carriers from the BTR-60 through the BTR-80. It remains in production and service across former Soviet states and beyond, and has appeared in most major conflicts fought with Soviet-pattern equipment since, including the Soviet–Afghan War, the Syrian civil war and Libya’s civil conflicts.

Its case shape was chosen to feed and extract reliably across every action type the round was meant to run in (bolt-action rifles, self-loading rifles and a belt-fed machine gun alike) under harsh field conditions, an unusually broad design brief for a single cartridge. Loadings have included armour-piercing incendiary, high-explosive incendiary, tracer and plain armour-piercing bullets, reflecting its use against lightly armoured vehicles, aircraft and material targets rather than as a standard infantry round.

As a cartridge developed for Soviet military service, the 14.5×114mm was never assigned a C.I.P. or SAAMI dimensional standard, and no free technical drawing equivalent to those civilian standards was found for it. Every case dimension and the ballistics of its several loadings on this page are drawn from Wikipedia’s own infobox, uncited there, and are recorded as estimated rather than verified throughout. Wikipedia’s infobox also states a maximum pressure, but without a body responsible for measuring it that figure cannot be recorded here at all, since a pressure reading is only meaningful alongside the standard it was measured under.