There are many ways to design a big-game bullet, including the partition style, popular in Germany in the early 20th century and brought to perfection by Mr. Nosler. Thickness of jacket is but one option. A jacket can also be designed to hold only a narrow lead core, for example, while the ogive section has a thinner jacket to encourage expansion. There is also the all-copper projectile that counts on integrity due to its single-element composition--no jacket and core to part ways from each other, but with expansion capability.

By special permission after a shoulder injury, the author was allowed to hunt Cape buffalo with his Mr. Clean Sweep .30-06 in Zimbabwe. The bull fell to one 220-grain Barnes Solid bullet, a highly developed projectile for special big-game applications.

Also prominent when ultimate penetration and bone crushing are required, as when hunting some dangerous game, is the true solid, as exemplified in the Barnes Solid that Sam used to take his Cape buffalo in Africa. These traits encompass only a small portion of the possible designs that cause a projectile to perform in various ways on different big game.

In spite of how good our big-game bullets are today, there remains a mad run to perfection that began when the envelope bullet, as jacketed projectiles were sometimes named, came on the scene more than 100 years ago.

Over time the most outrageous big-game bullet designs have come and gone, only to come again. In the Greener text, there is the Hebler-Krnka Tubular Bullet with a hole running its entire length. This hole is labeled an "air passage," as, indeed, air must pass through from nose to base. Invented circa 1900 by Mr. Krnka, the design was further developed by Professor Hebler. Of course, a "shoe" or sabot was required to form a base seal, lest expanding gases simply blow through the bullet without shoving on the base.

Greener asserted that "the theory advanced on behalf of the tubular projectile is that the resistance offered by the air to the bullet is caused by the condensation or compression of air strata immediately in front of the bullet." Not gravity but rather the atmosphere causes the greater loss of velocity, so this bullet with the hole was designed to thwart the ravages of what one writer likened to shooting underwater.

Good jacketed bullets were available to shooters by 1895 when the .30-30 and its little sister, the .25-35, burst on the scene, the first sporting cartridges to burn smokeless powder with velocities at twice the speed of sound. Previous full-metal-jacketed bullets for the 8mm Lebel and .30-40 Krag were fine for military application, but Winchester, along with rival companies of the era, had to come up with projectiles capable of withstanding smokeless-powder speed while at the same time imparting more energy to the target than the landscape behind it. The mad dash to a perfect big-game bullet preceded Winchester's smokeless cartridges, but the higher-velocity round of the era marked the search for a perfect modern big-game bullet.

When velocities escalated another grand, designers were forced to their drawing boards for new designs. Typically American, every company advertised its bullet as ideal for big game. If you had 90 cents in your pocket in 1894, you could buy a box of 20 .30 U.S. Army (.30-40 Krag) cartridges with a "steel jacketed bullet." Not long after, there were plenty of "softnose" jacketed bullets available for that and other ammo.