6.5×47mm Lapua

The 6.5×47mm Lapua is a rimless bottleneck target cartridge that the ammunition maker Nammo Lapua developed in 2005 with the Swiss rifle maker Grünig & Elmiger, specifically for competition shooting. It has no direct parent case, though it borrows much of its character from the short, wide-bodied 6mm PPC benchrest round.

Its layout is built around long, slender target bullets. The case neck is long enough to hold such a bullet without its base sitting below the neck, and the chamber dimensions are optimised for target bullets. Its base diameter and overall length are close to those of the .308 Winchester, so it takes the same bolt heads and fits the same short actions and magazines, and it uses a small rifle primer. Its case holds less than those of the 6.5mm Creedmoor and .260 Remington it is usually compared with, and it gives up a little muzzle velocity to both as a result, but it has set records at long range and was the dominant chambering in the Precision Rifle Series in 2016.

The dimensions and pressure ceiling on this page come from the C.I.P. datasheet for “6,5 x 47 Lapua”. Both loads are Lapua’s own factory ammunition, with bullet mass and G1 and G7 ballistic coefficients as the maker publishes them. Lapua’s product pages also give a muzzle velocity for each load but state no barrel length, and the velocities in the encyclopedia’s table come from reloading data, so no velocity is recorded here.