Flat-base bullets are inherently more accurate than boattail bullets because it is almost impossible to put boattails on perfectly. Even so, over long range, a boattail's ballistic benefits outweigh any manufacturing flaws.

Check with any Highpower shooter worth a shot, and he or she will most likely tell you to use boattail bullets for the best accuracy. The 1,000 Benchrest crowd will probably tell you the same. But ask the "short-range" Benchrest shooters—-the ones who literally compare the size of one-hole groups to see who wins—-and you're more likely to be sent after a box of custom-made flat-base bullets. Why the difference? Both long- and short-range shooters are looking for the smallest groups, the best ballistics, the greatest accuracy, and the highest possible scores. What works for one should work for the other, right? Not necessarily.

Flat-base bullets are fairly simple to manufacture compared to boattail bullets. So long as you have high-quality, consistent jackets, consistent cores with no voids, square bases, quality bullet-forming dies, and excellent quality control and cleanliness, there is no reason most manufacturers can't make decent flat-based bullets. Custom bullet makers even take flat-based bullets to accuracy levels hard for most shooters to imagine. There's less that can go wrong in manufacturing a flat-base bullet with the main points being that the bullet is round and the base is square to the bearing surface, or bourrelet. Because they can be manufactured to higher tolerances and less manufacturing variables, flat-base bullets are inherently more accurate than boattail bullets. In the field instead of on a target range, flat-base bullets tend to hold onto their cores much better than boattails with less instance of "bananafication," or the squirting out of the lead core from the copper jacket upon penetrating. Core separations have lead to improvements including Hornady's Interlock, various bonded bullets and manufacturers such as Nosler coming up with "Solid Base" boattails that offer the benefits of boattails, but with the cavity inside the bullet jacket square in the bottom like a flat-base instead of tapered inside the boattail.

Regarding terminal ballistics, Nosler makes its boattail bullets behave like flat base bullets by making "solid base" boattails. That design has the lead core bottoming out in a flat-base pocket above the boattail.

If there's a drawback to flat-based bullets, it's that their center of gravity is more toward their rear, which doesn't help stability. But for a given caliber and bullet weight, flat-base bullets can be made shorter than boattail bullets and are thus stabilized in a slower twist. Another drawback is that as flat-base bullets pass through the air, the air flowing over the bullet's surface wants to slam back together at the base. That creates quite a bit of turbulence resulting in base drag. So long as a bullet is going supersonic, or faster than the speed of sound, which is about 1080 fps at sea level, the greatest amount of drag is on the nose of the bullet as it compresses the air faster than the air can get out of the way. At high velocity, the base drag is not as significant a percentage of the overall drag. But once a bullet drops below the speed of sound, into the transonic and subsonic velocity range, base drag becomes the dominant drag component.

Compared to flat-base bullets, it's more difficult to manufacture accurate boattail bullets. Bullets are formed in dies, and the boattail will always be off by 1/2 the amount of clearance between the punch and the die. Tolerances have to be extremely tight. In a manufacturing environment, it's simply not possible to put boattails on perfectly square or perfectly straight, but the better manufacturers sure come close. And as a bullet gets larger in diameter, the tolerance error between die and punch becomes less a percentage of the overall bullet and less of a factor in accuracy. That's why large boattail bullets, such as Hornady's .50-caliber A-Max are some of the most accurate long-range bullets in the world.

It takes eleven steps to form the Hornady .50-caliber A-Max bullet. It is one of the most accurate boattail bullets on the market. Because of its size, manufacturing tolerances are a smaller percentage of the overall bullet, and affect accuracy less.

Boattails increase the ballistic coefficient of bullets, which helps them overcome air resistance and wind deflection. The shape also helps the air flow transition over the heel of the bullet and reduces the base diameter resulting in less base drag. Many shooters use that as their argument for shooting boattails over flat-bases, while others look at how often they take a shot at something so far away that boattails seem to matter and dismiss them as unnecessary. It's true that the tail really proves its worth at longer ranges and lower velocities, but it's wrong to dismiss them because of that.