.300 Savage

The .300 Savage was Savage Arms’ 1920 attempt to fit close to .30-06 Springfield performance into a case short enough for its Model 99 lever-action rifle’s action, at a time when the .30-06 itself needed a bolt-action’s longer action length to feed reliably. Necked up from the earlier .250 Savage, it gave lever- and bolt-action hunters a genuinely flat-shooting medium-game round without the longer receiver a full-length .30-06 case demanded, and it sold well into both rifle types for decades.

Its main historical significance came after its own commercial peak: when the US Army and then Winchester wanted a shorter cartridge to replace the .30-06 in a new generation of battle and sporting rifles in the early 1950s, they used the .300 Savage’s case capacity and overall length as the starting point for what became 7.62×51mm NATO and its civilian twin, the .308 Winchester — a cartridge that went on to eclipse the .300 Savage commercially within a few years of its 1952 introduction.

Every dimension in this entry comes from the C.I.P. datasheet for “300 Savage”. Of the three factory loads Wikipedia’s infobox lists, only Hornady’s 150-grain SST Superformance load could be independently confirmed against a live manufacturer product page, stating a 24-inch test barrel; the Remington Core-Lokt and Federal soft-point loads are cited only to a retailer (MidwayUSA) rather than the manufacturers directly, so their bullet mass and velocity figures are recorded as estimated. Two further loads in the infobox, a 150-grain FMJ and a 165-grain PSPCL, are cited to Accurate Powder’s reloading-data pages and are excluded entirely: those figures describe a handloaded charge weight rather than a factory cartridge. No ballistic coefficient is published for any of the three loads recorded here.