For a general purpose hunting rifle my thoughts look like this.
A 150 grain bullet at 3000 fps. This gives 3000 ft lbs of energy.
With today's bullets that combination covers even more situations than when I first started critically thinking about hunting rifles over 40 years ago.
It is a good mix of velocity, trajectory, energy, recoil, rifle weight, rifle length, and so on.
Diameter .277-.308.
There are very few situations where some thing else is really warranted.
I have used such a combination on many animals from 40 to 1500 pounds. Hit in the center of the heart lung area and the results are uniform...critter within 30 yards or so. Hit outside and they all can go a long ways. The heart and lungs of the largest weigh maybe 20-25 pounds.
Last edited by RinB; 05/10/16.
