What is the most powerful, commonly available, short action cartridge?

I say commonly available as the most powerful short action round full stop 8s the .475 Bishop which throws a 390gr pill @ 2,500 fps.
I want to know is what's the most powerful short action that you could find in a reasonably well stocked gun shop? One of the Winchester Short Magnums? 375 Ruger is out as that is a standard length cartridge.

S&W Fan said:

My vote would go to the 7mm-08 . I’m not sure that it’s the most Powerful short action cartridge out there but it certainly ranks right up there with a pretty powerful shot action cartridge that can be found stocked at any good gun store.

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Any of the Winchester Short Magnums fit in a short action znd they are all proper magnum cartridges, equalling their longer cousins.
I'm wondering if there is a rifle cartridge that sits between, say the .325 WSM and the very boutique .475 Bishop. I'm just curious as I am not a hunter, if I were to do some hunting I would setup a hybrid hunting/target rifle on a Tikka action in 6.5 Creedmoor. I'd wager there isn't anything the 7mm-08 could do the 6.5 Creedmoor couldn't.

Xae289 said:

I'd say the .300 WSM. You can find more power in the WSSMs or the .325 WSM, but they aren't what I'd call commonly available. The .338 Federal is neither as powerful as the .300 WSM, nor is it as available. Even the .300 WSM isn't something I'd expect to find in most NY or PA gunstore shelves and will mostly be an online order deal, but I wouldn't be surprised to find it in a store, where I would be surprised to find the other ones stocked.

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I thought the WSSMs were all defunct due to a lawsuit? In any the 3 WSSM cartridges I'm familiar with (I did research prior to posting this thread) merely duplicate longer cartridges. The .223 WSSM is equivalent to the .220 Swift, the .243 WSSM is equivalent to the .243 Winchester and the .25 WSSM is similar to the .257 Roberts none of which are near to the .300 WSM which duplicates the .300 Win Mag.
Incidently the .475 Bishop is right alongside the .458 Win Mag and was designed to be the most powerful round an AR-10 platform can take. For when you are defending against multiple T-Rexs at once.

Xae289 said:

I didn't realize the WSSMs are dead by lawsuit and that the .300 WSSM was always a wildcat.

But yea, going by the "commonly available" criteria, I still maintain the .300 WSM. It will be in some gun stores and will be readily available online. The next ones up would be the .338 Federal, 7mm SAUM and 6.8 Western, I think. I don't think they're as available as the .300 WSM. After that, I'd say the .308 in power, which is hands-down the winner in availability.

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I can't recall the specifics nor the names of the guy but I do remember reading that a fellow went to Winchester with a series of cartridge designs that were extremely similar if not identical to what would become the WSSM cartridges with in the hope that Winchester would adopt and produce them from which he wanted to collect royalty fees. Winchester offered a one time lump sum fee and there was some back and forth with the individual which ultimately came to nothing. Then shortly after this Winchester released the WSSM line and thus guy takes Winchester to court and he won his case and after that Winchester discontinued the WSSM line, presumably to avoid paying royalty fees. Or so I read. I imagine that since that family of cartridges wasn't achieving anything new in a ballistics sense that they were gonna take off anyway.

On a side note I do think there is a market for updated, beltless versions of traditional magnum cartridges, which is kinda whar we are seeing with some of Hornady's PRC cartridges. The 6.8 Western is also an interesting cartridge being a modified version of the .270 Winchester Short Magnum. It's is specifically altered in a way to accept very heavy for caliber bullets and uses a fast twist rate in the barrel for long range precision fire. Incidently the 270 WSM is tge ballistic doppelganger of the 270 Winchester but in a form factor that fits a short action, as is the case with all the WSM cartridges.

On a further side note I read once that the 6.5 Creedmore is ballistic doppelganger of the venerable 6.5 Swedish and after a bit of research I found this to be indeed true. Both cartridges launch tge same bullet weights at the same velocities, the Creed does so with a smaller case loaded to higher pressure. The Scandinavians have been successfully using the the 6.5 Swede to take game as large as moose.

The 6.5 Creedmores parent case is the .30 Thompson Center which is kind of like an optimized .308 case in much the same vein as the Ackley improved cartridges. The goal of the .30 TC was to get 30-06 Springfield performance out of a .308 Winchester sized cartridge which it succeeded in doing, the 30 TC achieves the same velocities at the same bullet weights as the 30-06. Therfore I say the 6.5 Creedmore, again which is based on the .30 TC, is probably the best all around short action cartridge though the precision competition scene favors 6mm cartridges.

In the end after further research it would seem there really isn't anything between the .300 or 325 WSM and the impressive, in both performance and cost, 475 bishop. The latter being a really gonzo cartridge.