We copied the Mauser rifle and it’s cartridge so closely that we lost a court case and were ordered to pay royalties to the Mauser company. Same rim, same case head diameter, same body taper, and same neck angle. We weren’t into metrics, so it was in .30 caliber instead of 7 or 8 mm. We lengthened it a bit, probably to try to get a few differences so we could try to avoid some of those royalties instead of for any performance gain.
Or, maybe it took a little more length to get 7.92x57 velocities with a slightly smaller in diameter bullet of nearly equivalent weight. In any case, the performance was an almost identical match for the 7.92x57 in a cartridge that was obviously developed from it. When the Germans changed to a 153 grain spitzer in 1903 increasing the velocity of their cartridge to about 2,700 feet per second, we followed suit a few years later and the 30-06 was born with almost identical numbers once again.
Probably...
Or Maybe...
Source.
Jerry
We copied the rifle and the cartridge...so closely, in fact, we lost TWO court cases. Now, you’re not going to find anything definitive saying we did exactly that and you know why? Because we KNEW at the time we were trying to circumvent patents and that any documentation to that effect would be discoverable and could be used against us in court.
At that time, every other country in the world that wanted a Mauser rifle and a German developed cartridge, paid royalties to DWM and the Mauser brothers. In the US, we simply reversed engineered their rifles and cartridges and tried to pass them off as our own.
