Geeks Gadgets and Guns, a gun-related podcast website, has published on their social media pages a photo from an ongoing LFD Research project depicting cartridges loaded with saboted bullets. Well, at first glance, I didn’t see anything extraordinary because these cartridges looked like Remington Accelerator replicas with different bullets. But when I read the caption of the picture I was amazed to learn that they actually loaded the saboted .224 caliber bullets into .300 RUM (.300 Remington Ultra Magnum) cases and managed to achieve muzzle velocities of “over one mile per second“. That’s over 5,280 fps or 1,609 m/s!

I talked to Matthew Schinzing, Editor of LFD Research, who kindly told me some details of this project. These unbelievable chronograph readings shown in the above-embedded image were recorded with 55-grain FMJ .224 caliber saboted bullets. Interestingly, during the initial testing, the Crosman PowerShot Red Flight Penetrator lead-free 16.7-grain .22 caliber airgun pellets appeared to be stabilized better than other tested projectiles.

Crosman Red Flight pellet pulled out of its sabot

LFD Research is planning to conduct the second stage of tests and will publish a video showing the results of this experiment. It would be interesting to see what bullet weights will stabilize in the barrel with a 1:10 twist rate and how uniform and consistent will be the sabot separation in a slow-motion footage. The projectiles that will be used in the second test are Everglades 62gr SS109, Hornady 88gr ELD Match, Barnes 36gr Varmint Grenade, Lehigh Defense 55gr Controlled Chaos and the Crossman .22 pellets. Stay tuned to learn about the results of this test and find out what bullets perform the best at these insanely high muzzle velocities.

I would also make tungsten subcaliber projectiles and do penetration tests. I am pretty sure, that such tungsten bullets accelerated to over 5K fps would show amazing results in the penetration department zipping through armor plates that are rated to stop much larger projectiles. Tell us in the comments section what would you like to see tested in this project.

Many thanks to Matthew Schinzing for the provided information and permission for using the images.