.30-30 Winchester

The .30-30 Winchester was introduced in 1895 as the smokeless-powder chambering for the Winchester Model 1894 lever-action rifle, and it is usually credited as the first small-bore sporting cartridge loaded with smokeless powder sold in the United States. Its name is a leftover of the black-powder era, when a cartridge’s name paired its nominal calibre with its nominal charge rather than a measured bullet diameter — a convention it inherited even though it was never sold as a black-powder round.

Like other rounds built for a rifle with a tubular magazine, its bullet nose is flat or gently rounded rather than pointed, so that recoil cannot drive one cartridge’s tip into the primer of the round ahead of it. That constraint has shaped every factory loading of the cartridge for well over a century, including modern polymer-tipped designs such as Hornady’s FTX and MonoFlex bullets, whose soft, deformable tips are shaped to satisfy the same magazine-safety requirement while behaving more like a spitzer bullet in flight. The cartridge’s rimmed, gently tapered case and modest 51.8 mm case length reflect a design built around a lever-action’s short receiver and tube magazine rather than long-range ballistics, and its retained energy at longer ranges falls off accordingly.

Despite its age the .30-30 remains in wide production and is still regarded as an adequate deer-hunting round at typical woods ranges.

This entry’s dimensions and pressure are transcribed from the C.I.P.’s TDCC datasheet. Both loads carry a manufacturer-stated 24-inch test barrel — Hornady publishes it directly on its own product pages, unlike the Wikipedia ballistics table for this cartridge, which lists five loads with no barrel length attached to any of them and so contributes no velocity here. No SAAMI-published pressure figure was found to compare against the C.I.P. one.