March 26, 2008 There are a few videos doing the rounds on Youtube at present showing people firing the A-SQUARE Hannibal 577 Tyrannosaur rifle and getting blown away with the recoil. It’s not surprising, because the monster gun is actually purpose built to stop charging Rhinos, Hippopotami, rogue elephants and it gained its name because it could indeed stop the biggest dinosaur – it’s the most powerful sporting gun in the world and shoots a 750 gr bullet at 2700 feet per second – the recoil of the 13 pound, US$4000 gun is so powerful that despite three mercury reducers in the butt plus a huge pad area, it kicks like a mule.
There’s also an excellent video of A-SQUARE proprietor Arthur Alphin discussing the gun and its origins with David E. Petzal. Arthur explains that the gun came about from a request from a Namibian professional hunter who had a tourist/client who wounded an elephant just enough to make him very angry, but not enough to kill it, and the hunter’s close call in dealing with the charging elephant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGM_Hecate_II
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzzle_brake
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.577_Tyrannosaur 750 gr (49 g) Monolithic Solid 2,480 ft/s (760 m/s) 10,240 ft·lbf
Normally, any bullet larger than a half-inch is considered a \"destructive device\", but SSK Industries got a sporting use exemption (the same kind of thing that keeps .72\" 12-gauge slugs from being banned) for his round. It may seem like pointless one-upsmanship, but I hear it is the single most accurate long-range round fired from a man-portable system. No reasonable amount of wind is going to redirect a half-pound projectile from the course it was set on.
Am I missing something? I would think the penalty for being off target when elephant hunting is that the elephant wins for a change.
So, we design a bigger rifle? Why not just hunt with a tank? At what point does it stop being "hunting" and become "slaughter?" That you can do at the stockyards for a lot less money.