Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Custom Rifles & Wildcats Meaning of Souper in .25 Souper

Does anyone know the real meaning of "Souper" in .25 Souper? When the 7.62 Ordnance brass was necked down to .25 caliber in the early 1950's, the wildcat was named .25 Souper. The meaning has not been clear. I know that cars that had their engines hotted-up were said to be "souped up" and I'm thinking "soup" in the 1950's was one of those words that are spelt the way they sound e.g. "Zoop" for the sound a fast car or bullet makes as it goes through air. Alternatively, was "souper" another way of writing "super" in the 1950's or from the french word "soup" meaning dinner?

Lost in the fog of time....

Dang fine cartridge, BTW...

The obvious answer - Souper = souped up. A .25 caliber bullet in a .308 (Win) 7.62x51 7 casing, = .25 Souper.
Can I prove it - No, but I was around when someone came up with it and in the deep recesses of my memory that is the way I remember it.

drover

I think the creators wanted it to have a little different spelling than just “super”. Maybe so people would ask, “what’s that?”

Ok, so what are the ballistics and performance reports?

Pretty much exactly what you’ll find in the .250 ackley improved. I have one with a 23.5” barrel and velocities equal what you’ll find listed in the Sierra manual for the .250/3000AI. Favorite loads would be Sierra 100gr match kings with 41 grains of ‘15, or 4166. Don’t know that I’d build another, but it’s not a bad cartridge.

I think, operative word being think, that it had something to do with Warren Page. Page's .243" bore wildcat was called the .240 Page Souper Pooper.

I have a 25 Souper in a Ruger 77 RSI that had been a 250AI with feeding issues. No such issues with the Souper.

What's in a name? If I remember right the Super Pooper was based on a 244/6mm Rem case & there was also a 240 Pooper based on the 243 case. Maybe a 6mm based on the 06 case it would have been called the Souper Pooper Scooper.

Before the early 1950's, there really wasn't the .243 bore except for a few chamberings which weren't widely used. Page was trying to convince everyone how good the .243 bore was in comparison to the .257 cartridges. So there was a lot of "hostility" between the new .243 advocates and the old .257 owners. At first he necked down 7.62 Ordnance brass to .243. At about the same time other wildcatters necked down 7.62 brass to .257 and called it the .257 Souper. Not to be out-done, he then necked down 7 x 57 brass to .243 and blew the case out, and gave it a name which implied it sh*tted on the .257 Souper in terms of performance. He would be positive to any 6-06 as he was touting that bore size, over the .257 bore size.

Fascinating American caliber history here! Thank gawd professional advertising finally got involved in that fight! That was a race to the bottom to pizz off as many people as they could! Quarter-bores could have been as American as the 270! ..., if only..

I always imagined if the 250-3000 had been built with 10-twist barrels (like the 25-35 WCF had, instead of the slow 14 twist), the 243 would never have been imagined. The 250 would have become the dominant coyote cartridge. The 257 Roberts would always be a fine deer cartridge, and the 25-06 for western distances... NONE of the 6mm cartridges would have caught on!

But quarter-bores always have suffered from a lack of long-distance low-drag bullet choices.., 6mm clearly won that pizzing contest.

Another thing to know is that Ned Roberts who was also a gun editor for one of the magazines of the time died, so he couldn't promote the .257 Roberts anymore, which left Warren Page as gun editor of another magazine free to actively promote the .243 and .244 without any rival competition.