7.5×54mm French

The 7.5×54mm French, officially the 7.5×54mm MAS mod. 1929, is a rimless bottlenecked rifle cartridge developed at the Manufacture d’armes de Saint-Étienne to replace the earlier 7.5×57mm MAS mod. 1924, itself a stopgap adopted after France’s post-war attempt to move off the old 8mm Lebel. It became the standard French service rifle and machine-gun cartridge from 1929 until superseded by 7.62×51mm NATO from the 1970s onward, arming the MAS-36 rifle, the MAS-49 self-loading rifle and the FM 24/29 light machine gun through the Second World War, Indochina and Algeria.

Dimensionally it is a shortened, modernised sibling of its 1924 predecessor: a 54 mm case against the earlier round’s 57 mm, giving a lighter, shorter action while keeping the same 7.84 mm bullet diameter and a comparable case capacity. Its 380 MPa pressure ceiling — recorded by C.I.P. only as an index figure, with no full datasheet published for the cartridge — sits at the high end for a rifle round of its generation, in keeping with the fully modernised case it represents.

This entry carries case and bullet dimensions from the cited Wikipedia infobox, recorded as estimated because no free C.I.P. datasheet exists for the cartridge beyond its pressure figure, and one ball load’s bullet mass. No velocity is recorded: the source ballistics table lists two different test barrel lengths for the article as a whole and does not say which one produced each load’s figures, and the playbook’s rule is that a velocity point needs a barrel length tied to it by the same source. No ballistic coefficient is published free for any of its loads, so the cartridge computes no trajectory.