.338 Lapua Magnum

The .338 Lapua Magnum was drawn up in 1983 by the US Research Armament Company as a conversion of the .416 Rigby for a US Navy long-range sniping trial, then finished and put into production by Lapua in Finland in 1989. The brief was a round that still held its accuracy and a useful share of its muzzle energy at 1,000 metres and beyond, fired from a rifle a two-man team could carry, which is a gap the belted magnums of the day did not fill and the .50 BMG filled only at several times the weight.

The case is unbelted and rimless, 69.2 mm long with a shallow 13.82-degree shoulder, holding an 8.61 mm bullet nearly 20 mm longer in overall length than a .308 Winchester round. That length is the point of the cartridge: it lets a heavy, high-ballistic-coefficient boat-tailed bullet sit without eating into powder capacity, so a rifle built around it is close in size and weight to a 7.62 mm system while retaining supersonic flight and useful energy well past where a 7.62x51mm round has gone transonic. NATO issue rifles chambered for it fire it under the reporting name 7.62x67mm.

Two Lapua factory loads are recorded here, a 16.2 g (250 gr) and a 19.4 g (300 gr) Scenar open-tip-match bullet, both tested from Lapua’s own 680 mm barrel — a rifle-length barrel, not the carbine lengths this site records for most service rifle cartridges, and consistent with the round’s role in purpose-built precision rifles rather than general-issue carbines.

Gaps on this page: no cartridge mass (loaded round, not bullet) is published by Lapua for either load. No photograph of the round chambered or fired is recorded; the gallery here is two studio specimen shots and one photograph of fired cases from a 2016 U.S. Marine Corps caliber study, rather than a picture of the cartridge in a rifle.