Thought I posted it here, but evidently it was an another thread about Ballistic Tips. These I know about by sectioning bullets: 7mm 120; 165, 168 and 180 .30; 180 8mm; 200 .338. The 200 .338 is now only available in the Ballistic Silvertip version, but despite the black coating and.silver plastic tip, it's the same jacket and core as the plain 200 Ballistic Tip. The 150 7mm also has a pretty heavy jacket, but I don't know if it's 2/3 of the bullet weight.
I would also be pretty sure the newer 220-grain .30 and 300-grain .458 Ballistic Tip and Ballistic Silvertip bullets also have very heavy jackets.
All of this could change. Nosler didn't make any major announcement about beefing up the jackets of the 165-180 .30 calibers. Instead they just went ahead and did it, because so many hunters insisted on hunting larger game with those bullets. But the 200-grain .338 was introduced in the early 1990's, and had the very heavy jacket from the beginning. I know this because Nosler sent me some to test back then. I shot some side-by-side with 210 Partitions into dry newspaper, my standard heavy-duty media for testing bullets, and the 200 BT's penetrated about 90% as deeply as the 210 Partitions. Next I tested them on big game, mostly larger than deer, and they penetrated very deeply. In fact the only one I recovered was several years later, when I shot a mature gemsbok bull, weighing around 450 pounds, in the right shoulder as it quartered strongly toward me. The bullet was recovered from under the hide of the left ham, retaining 59.4% of its weight.
The very heavy-jacket .30's and the 180 8mm are constructed the same way. There was also a very brief period when Nosler made 225 .358, 250 9.8 and 260 .375 Ballistic Tips, but soon after they were introduced Nosler changed them into AccuBonds. However, even when not bonded the 260 .375 still penetrated very well. I field-tested it in Africa on a cull hunt in 2002, loaded to around 2700 fps from a .375 H&H. Among other things it shot lengthwise through springbok, and broke both shoulders of a gemsbok bull weighing 550 pounds on a certified scale--in both instances exiting.
One of the interesting aspects of all this while Nosler was introducing these initial heavy-jacket Ballistic Tips, a lot of hunters continued to believe they would "blow up," because they were Ballistic Tips. Of course, those hunters never tried them.
