6.5×54mm Mannlicher–Schönauer

The 6.5×54mm Mannlicher–Schönauer is a rimless, bottlenecked rifle cartridge, the direct descendant of the rimmed 6.5×53mmR of the 1891 Mannlicher rifle, redesigned to feed smoothly through the Schönauer rotary magazine of the Mannlicher–Schönauer rifle. Cartridge and rifle were first shown together at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, and the Greek Army adopted both in 1903; the round was Greece’s standard military cartridge from 1906 until 1941.

Its long 6.5 mm bullets have a high ballistic coefficient and sectional density, which give them stability in flight and resistance to wind drift and require a fast rifling twist. It became a well-regarded hunting round: W. D. M. “Karamojo” Bell used it for about 300 of his elephants, and Mannlicher–Schönauer sporting rifles in the calibre were the most common red-deer stalking rifles in the United Kingdom in the first half of the twentieth century.

Case and pressure dimensions here come from C.I.P.’s published standard and are recorded as verified. Two commercial bullet weights and velocities are recorded from Wikipedia’s infobox; the infobox cites the same C.I.P. datasheet used for the dimensions above, but that sheet publishes only dimensions and pressure, not velocity or bullet mass, so these load figures are recorded as estimated rather than verified. No photograph of a Mannlicher–Schönauer rifle appears on this site.