The .416Barrett or 10.6×83mmcenterfirerifle cartridge is a proprietary bottlenecked centrefire riflecartridge designed in 2005. It is an alternative to the.50 BMG in long-range high-power rifles. It was designed in response to a request for a medium/heavy rifle cartridge combination that was issued from Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane Division in late 2004. Its metric size is 10.6×83mm.
Design
The Barrett.416 cartridge was designed by Chris Barrett, son of Ronnie Barrett, with the help of Pete Forras. The bullet was designed using some NACA low-supersonic-drag equations to design the shape. The cartridge was designed as an improvement to the.50 BMG cartridge, a common machine gun and rifle cartridge. It is a wildcatted.50 BMG case, shortened to from its original length of 3.91 inches and necked down to accept a.416 caliber, projectile; however, the case dimensions are proprietary. Because the two cartridges, the.50 BMG and.416 Barrett, have identical base dimensions, all that is needed to convert a rifle to use one or the other cartridge is a relatively quick barrel swap. The Barrett Model 99 was initially the only commercially available rifle using the cartridge. In 2009, Zel Custom Manufacturing released the Tactilite.416 Barrett upper for AR-style rifles Zel Custom Manufacturing curtailed operations in 2018 which was subsumed by another manufacturer, McCutchen Firearms, after the BATFE classified barreled upper assemblies in.50 caliber to be firearms in and of themselves on July 17, 2018. There is now a range of options available from several manufacturers: Noreen Firearms makes a rifle in.416 Barrett, as does Desert Tech, and Barrett now also has a.416 Barrett option for its semi-automatic M82A1.
The use of a lighter, narrower bullet results in a significantly higher muzzle velocity and superior ballistic performance to the.50 BMG, and the.416 Barrett is claimed to retain more energy than the.50 BMG at distances over 1,000 yards. Barrett claims that this cartridge is capable of propelling a 398 gr solid brass boattail spitzer bullet out of the barrel of a Model 99single-shot rifle at 960 m/s, giving it a ballistic coefficient of.720, and keeping the projectile supersonic out to 1,737 meters. In a second-season episode of Future Weaponsthe host engaged in a shooting competition with another sniper. Machowicz achieved a cold-bore first-shot "kill" at 2,500 yards using a.416 Barrett Model 99 rifle while his competition, using a.50 BMG, required three shots to achieve a "kill". The.416 Barrett Model 99 rifle Mr. Machowicz used during this competition was equipped with a Barrett Optical Ranging System module attached to the telescopic sight.
.416 Barrett MSG bullet
Improvement beyond this standard while still using standard.416 Barrett brass seems possible, but the bullets have to be specially designed. An example of such a special.416 Barrett very low drag extreme range bullet is the German CNC manufactured mono-metal 27.5 gram .416 Barrett MSG. The solid brass.416 Barrett MSG bullet has an overall length of and derives its exceptional low drag from a radical LD Haack or Sears-Haack profile in the bullet's nose area. Rifles chambered for this cartridge bullet combination, with a cartridge overall length of, have to be equipped with custom made long 279 mm twist rate barrels to stabilize the.416 Barrett MSG projectiles and attain a projected 1,032 m/s muzzle velocity.
A few jurisdictions in the United States, most notably California, as well as a few nations such as Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands and Denmark restrict or prohibit civilian ownership of rifles chambered to use the.50 BMG cartridge, but not other calibers. For California, Section 30905 of the California Penal Code governs exceptions/exclusions to the law:
