The .44 Remington Magnum, invented by Elmer Keith in the mid-1950's, is no longer the most powerful Straight Case handgun cartridge. Actually, I'm not sure it lasted more than about 20 years, until the .44 Auto Mag was invented, and a pistol built for it. I had an opportunity to buy one of those back in 1974, but it was pay the house payment or buy the gun, not both. A friend of mine with more of the necessary wheeled out a roll of bills and paid the guy $200 in cash for the gun (after I fired up the teletype machine and determined it wasn't a stolen firearm).
The Auto Mag used a cut-down 30-06 or .308 WIN battle-rifle cartridge case, with the bottleneck sliced off. It had a rotating bolt with 6 locking lugs, and it was a DEVIL to clear. You had to have King Kong's grip strength to pull that bolt back past the locking cam.
IIRC, it fired a 240-grain bullet at right around 1800 fps. Ammo was over a dollar per round, and I could buy a whole box of 30-30 for little more than that. Milsurp 7.62 NATO was about 9-12 cents per round then, with 30-06 about the same or cheaper. I think they gave .303 British away, and a REAL Jungle Carbine could be had for about $49. My Savage 99E was still considered a modern firearm, not the antique it is today.
...and the .44 Magnum was for macho guys who could hang on to either a Ruger Redhawk DA or a 3-screw Blackhawk SA in that caliber. Yep, they were "thumpenboomers", more of a curiosity then than the staple of the gunny scene that they've become since.
Today, the .44 Remington Magnum isn't even considered a "thumpenboomer" round any more. That honor goes to the 50 Alaskan, the .475 Linebaugh, the 500 S&W, or maybe the .454 Casull. There is also a pair of Ruger cartridges bigger than the "old" .44 Magnum now.
For Yours Truly, though, the .44 Maggy is all the big-bore Straight Case round I'll ever need, and I have a fine revolver, the Colt Anaconda, and a levergun, the Marlin 1894 to shoot it in.
Today, I received (in only 3 days, WOO-HOO!) my order of Xtreme Bullets' offerings, and some Starline brass to load it in. The .44 bullet is Xtreme's 240-gr Copper-Plated Lead Round Nose, Flat Point. It's a heavily-plated bullet, could probably pass most folks' definition of a FMJ round. You need a Flat Point round for the tubular magazine in the Marlin, so the rounds in the magazine, lined up end-to-end, don't touch each other off under recoil from firing the chambered cartridge.
The recoil from my "thumpenboomer" round will be STOUT. The round is loaded for the rifle, with a powder that will need most of the 18.5" barrel to burn in. I use Hodgdon's H-110, which followed Elmer Keith's original 2400 powder as the go-to load for large-capacity handgun cartridges in guns with long barrels. I use 25 grains of that fine powder, just shy of the SAAMI-max load of 16.7. I haven't run this load past a chrony, but it would probably do 1500+ out of a long revolver barrel, so I'm guessing 230 more fps for the carbine barrel. That will give it 3/4 of a ton of muzzle energy, and it will still have 500 #/ft energy out past 300 yards (but a 6-foot POI drop). With this round, the rifle is very useful out to just over 200 yards, where it drops about 14".
I COULD shoot this round in my Anaconda, but why? In the revolver, I'm more than happy with a half-ton of muzzle energy, and Green Box Reminton just about gets me that.
In the below photo, these "thumpenboomers" are on the left. These are the trial rounds (loaded in once-fired cases). If they shoot as well as they should, I'll load a couple hundred more in new brass.
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