I genuinely do not know what to make of this.
Federal is kicking off 2025 with a bold announcement: it’s “reinventing ammunition.” The company released its new 7mm Backcountry cartridge today, but that’s not even the biggest headline. The Peak Alloy case technology that houses the round is shaking things up even more.
What wizardry is this?
Engineers were clear that from the beginning, they were working to answer a market call for Magnum velocity out of shorter barrels and tailored to suppressed hunting – all without increasing recoil.
Wait: building something new in response to actual customer wishes? (Be still, my fainting Marketing heart.) Are we talking about the gun business?
Anyway, let’s see how they did this:
The physical casing itself is what allowed this round to come to fruition. The case technology, known here as Peak Alloy, is fundamentally different from standard brass casings. According to Federal, the alloy was developed using a proprietary steel alloy that includes other unique elements as a response to United States military solicitations.
The goal is a stronger build that allows Federal to safely increase chamber pressures “far beyond the limits of brass case ammunition, significantly increasing velocity and energy.”
Okay, I get where this is going: MOAR power and therefore greater velocity coming from the stronger cartridge casing, coupled with lower recoil. The good news is that they stuck with the tried-and-true 7mm (.284″) boolet instead of reinventing the whole frigging wheel (which would probably have been the case back in the 1990s).
I would love love love to have seen this happen with the 6.5mm boolet — imagine a “new” cartridge casing for my favorite 6.5x55mm Swede — but of course nobody’s going to spend time, money and resources just to please this (my) particular segment of the market.
In any event, these new Wunderkind-Patronen will of course require a new rifle (as if we couldn’t have predicted that little consequence).
And will these rifles be affordable to our suffering hoi polloi? Don’t be silly: just look at the manufacturers who’ve signed on to this little exercise:
…none of whom are renowned for their affordability. (Although Savage is also slated for an entry, an educated guess will suggest that their guns will likewise be among their existing premium products and not Axios.)
Bah.
Look, I’m sure that this is a great innovation. But color me skeptical, because at the end of the day, this looks like just another WSSM or Rem Super Magnum product (remember them? me neither) and yet another attempt to sell more rifles. There’s nothing wrong with all that — hell, it’s actually a Good Thing, especially in a military context — but it just means that people like myself won’t be participating.
I would be curious, however, to see how this new alloy casing would work in dangerous game calibers such as the 9.3x62mm, .375 H&H or .458 Win Mag, where reduced recoil would be welcomed with open arms.
But that’s never going to happen, is it?
I can’t wait for the comments here from people who actually understand this stuff. Since I’ve never let that stop me before, my first thought when reading about this a few days ago was that it was an interesting idea to stiffen the cartridge so you could increase the muzzle velocity. The three nuggets of information you have here that I missed in my quick read:
1. 7mm – ugh – why don’t they do this a common caliber? Because..
2. Lower recoil – As the owner of a couple of Mosin’s this would be welcome! Love the boom and smoke, hate the ice packs after range day
3. Rife for the new round? WTH? If you just want to increase muzzle velocity, BUY A BIGGER GUN! Inventing a cool new round that requires a new rife is like kissing your sister!
Erp! on the 7mm, I am getting old! After thinking about it, a 7mm was the first “big bore” rife I owned, lol! I bought it when I got orders to go to AK, just in case I got a chance to go bear hunting (or have with me for outdoor fun in case of a bear). In the Army at that time, if you lived in the barracks, personal firearms had to be stowed in the unit’s armory. When I went to check it in, the armorer asked me what I was going to use it for. When I told him bear hunting / protection, he sadly shook his head and said 30/06 was the entry point for that purpose.. and I sold it shortly thereafter.
I listened to an interview with a representative from Federal on Tom Grisham’s Gun Talk. It’s a rather good podcast that I listen to regularly.
I have the same reservations about any new cartridge. Will it become .45GAP or WSSM cartridges of the 90s or will it succeed? only time will tell. It’s an interesting concept. We have had brass, steel and aluminum cases. Even polymer (read plastic) cases have made it to the market. The new .277 Sig Fury being implemented by the US Military is using a composite casing. So far only brass is able to reused to make more ammunition. I hope this new proprietary casing is able to be reloaded by folks at the reloading bench at home.
As they said in the interview, hunting with silencers or more accurately called suppressors, is the factor driving the market on a lot of fronts. The lower recoil is always a nice feature but overcoming physics is difficult to impossible.
After discussing the PRC and Creedmoor families of newer cartridges with another enthusiast, I drove home thinking about the question “what is the youngest cartridge that I have at home for regular use?” For handguns the answer was a .40S&W that was developed in the late 1980s to early 1990s or so. For rifle cartridges, the answer the question was .308 Winchester/7.62×51 Nato developed in the mid 1950s or so. The .40 is slowly going extinct. The 30/06 is still doing quite well for a cartridge that has already celebrated its 100th birthday.
I would love a rifle chambered in 6.5×55 Swede (entirely your fault Kim) or 7mm-08. I think either of those would fill the gap between .30 Carbine and .308 Winchester very nicely. Flat shooting and mild recoil as I get older and bring nephews into the fold.
And as an extra feature for the home reloader, it would be Berdan primed.
Putting aside how this reminds me of how each new Microsoft product requires a new machine to run it, while ultimately falling short of the pre-production hype, just tell me the casing is made from recycled windmill blades and EV batteries and I’ll buy it in every available caliber.
It’s really the other way around. Faster machines mean that more complex software can be created to do more stuff faster and with more precision but it can’t be run on the earlier versions. You don’t have to buy the new product – The old stuff still works.
In the beginning computer chips used 8 – 1and 0’s to represent a single caricature. then 16 and 32 and now 64 1’s and 0’s can be processed at exponentially faster speeds along Mutiple parallel paths simultaneously. Microsoft and others just use the increased power available to do more.
And then they stop doing updates on the old operating system which leaves you with what?
They stopped doing updates a long time ago but are still companies running legacy software on 30 year old NT servers. People are afraid to shut them down because they will never restart.
As I sit here staring at my 30-30, thinking, do I really need more boomstick for shooting whitetails? I mean, hell, if I need more boomstick, I’ll use my 30-06. But still, what if I need MORE boomstick? Guess I need to invest in a 45-70. OK, sold. I’ll go rifle shopping. Not for that mess up there though.
More seriously, the gun industry is really odd compared to just about anything else. Where else do you find yourself competing with your own products from 100 years ago? A good pre-64 Model 60 is worth more than any 4 or 5 modern rifles today. And people will still line up for it. The tried and true method is to invent a new cartridge, then a new firearm just for that cartridge, then pay all the magazines (now internet content providers – ugh) to hype that new stuff heavily for months. Rinse and repeat.
It’s been a while since I took and used all the ” Material Science / Strengh of Materials” courses a Mechanical Engineer is subjected to but basically Brass is much more malleable (softer) than steel.
That’s a good thing if you need to rapidly make a whole bunch of small one time use closed ended tubes to then be filled with a powdery substance and then plug the open end with a piece of lead and crimp the whole thing sealed.
However, if you also want to maximize the pressure that can be contained before expelling the lead plug you need to make the tube out of a less soft material and probably play with the final crimping step by adding rings or grooves. But that also will impact the cost of the manufacturing process since more temperature and force will be needed to produce the tubes using the more expensive materials.
Finding the right alloy that maximizes all the required parameters just takes time and testing. Creating and using the correct “unobtanium” is Engineering’s job. The rest is up to accounting and Marketing.
Re-inventing the ComBlock steel-cased ammo?
I’m trying to wrap my head around how a different cartridge material is going to allow them to achieve all of these goals: higher velocity out of shorter barrels without increasing recoil. Sure, the new material will allow higher chamber pressures in support of the first two, but the old equal and opposite force law will not be denied and recoil *must* go up. Unless that’s why new rifles are required, which are either heavier or have some form of active recoil dampening?
It also occurs to me that higher pressures and velocity will be rough on barrel life. Barrel erosion is already a thing with “hot” loads.
F=MA If you want to keep the same recoil (F) and you have the same projectile ( M ) then you are left with adjusting the Acceleration ( A ). You could do that by adjusting the speed and force required for the “release” of the projectile from the cartridge. Thats controlled by the “grip” the cartridge casing has on the projectile. Just how you measure, control and adjust all of that is why the Engineers are paid the big bucks. Physics still wins but you can always play with the variables.
All of these new rifles and cartridges are great in my opinion. It keeps engineers working, as well as machine operators making the products, shippers, accountants, marketers etc. But in the back of the mind, a variation of Cooper’s adage sticks, “it’s an answer in search of a question.” What does this new cartridge do better than existing cartridges? I’d rather that be answered by the folks in the engineering department than the marketing department
From what I’ve been able to gather, the new case material means the cartridge develops pressures up around 80000 psi. So with the right powder, you can get massive pressure throwing a medium weight projectile at massive velocities. The massive pressure is probably what driving the need for new guns…maybe.
Its quite impressive technology, but from the point of view of hunters I don’t think it will make much of a difference. I have a 6.5 Swede, and it does all I need it to do. A Swede built with this tech would be incrementally better, but probably not enough to make me buy it.
At then end of the day you still have a combination of projectile weight, velocity, muzzle blast, recoil and barrel life to deal with, and I reckon this 7mm will be a real barrel burner.
Until the engineers can give me…I dunno… a projectile weapon with 20000 fps mv with zero recoil, or a laser, or a phaser or some other sci-fi thing, I’ll be happy to walk into the hills with my Swede, introduced in 1896 and still going strong.
If the new case can actually safely contain pressure of 80k PSI, I think this is a great development, and it may have implications for other cartridges now in common use. IIRC, the Federal spokesman I heard hinted that the technology might be useable in existing rifles because modern rifles are built to withstand pressure way above 80k PSI.
If I was just starting on my hunting journey, instead of entering into the last 20% of it, I’d give serious thought to the 7BC. Instead, I’ll cling to my .30-06 and new-fangled 6mm ARC and wish Federal much success. My ol’ .30-06 will do everything I need within the rifleman’s quarter mile (440 yards), which is my self-imposed limit on animals.
One other thing I heard the Federal spokesman say was that since the cartridge uses less powder than lower-pressure cartridges to get comparable speed, barrel life is actually better than in magnums. We have all heard proclamations of greatness when new cartridges have been introduced, only to be disappointed by their real-world performance, so I will reserve final judgment on this offering for a year or two.
A 9.3×62 with the same velocity and energy of the 9.3×64 Brenneke. Interesting idea.
Standard case head/ bolt face (.473″), 5 rds vs 4 rds in a standard Mauser action.
What’s not to like?