Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today I want to talk a bit about 30 Super Carry.
A lot of other people are talking about 30 Super Carry,
I would like to think that I have a bit of a different perspective on this
than some of the other commentators out there.
So I have been saying for several years now that I would love to have
a SIG P365 in 7.65 French Long.
You may know that I kind of have a thing for 7.65 French.
The original French pistols, especially the 1935A like this one,
are beautiful pistols and really fun to shoot.
And it was really fantastic that Starline started making brass
and Steinel started making ammo for these, and you can actually shoot them now.
And when I heard that Federal was introducing the 30 Super Carry,
and I got a glimpse at what that cartridge looked like,
I was immediately very excited that they were reintroducing the 7.65 French Long.
And in fact I went up to their guys at Shot Show to ask them about it.
And when I very excitedly started giggling on about 7.65 French I got pretty much a blank stare.
They didn't know what I was talking about, they frankly didn't really care.
They were very nice about it, but they really obviously didn't care.
They came up with this concept independently of any historical references.
Now what 30 Super Carry technically is
it is actually a millimetre longer case than the French cartridge.
It is a 0.312 inch bullet (so that's the same diameter as .32 ACP,
it's also the same diameter as .327 Federal Magnum revolver cartridge), by 21mm overall length.
The French (and the Pedersen Device) ... used a 20mm long case.
The 30 Super Carry is 1mm longer, which is good because it's also substantially higher pressure.
It's a 50,000 psi cartridge, which is kind of eye-poppingly high pressure for a sub-compact pistol.
But that extra ... millimetre of length means that you
can't accidentally chamber a very high pressure 30 Super Carry in your surplus army pistol
that was not meant for anything nearly that high pressure. So that's a good thing.
Now, I started this off by talking about a P365.
Well the fact of the matter is I essentially have that pistol now,
it is a Smith & Wesson Shield Plus in 30 Super Carry.
This is dimensionally almost identical to a P365.
It's slightly shorter in the slide and just slightly longer in the grip.
And with the slightly extended magazine
(which I like because it gives me a really good three finger grip on the gun),
this gives me 16 plus one cartridges, 17 rounds that you can stuff into this thing,
which is really impressively large.
So before we go further, let's take a quick look
at the ammunition itself and what the cartridge looks like.
Thanks to Federal, I have two different versions of ammunition here to tinker with today.
We've got some of their HST jacketed hollow point defensive ammo.
And we've got some of their standard FMJ practice ammo.
So that is what you're looking at.
And there is the flat nose FMJ practice version.
Naturally of course, I also have some 7.65 French Long.
So this is ... 1950 production you can see, it is steel case as it was at that time.
This ammunition, by the way, in my experience is virtually all duds and hang fires.
So I've had a lot of very helpful people point out where I can find this ammo
for my French pistols and submachine gun. And I really appreciate the thought,
but I don't buy more of this ammo because it just doesn't work reliably.
Putting those two rounds side by side you can obviously see the similarity.
The brass one here, a 30 Super Carry, is approximately 1mm longer,
substantially higher pressure, but otherwise essentially identical, same bullet diameter.
By the way, they went with "30" Super Carry for this,
right there, despite the fact that it is a 0.312 inch bullet.
Technically that's the same diameter as .32 ACP.
(There's our defensive load.) So why did they not call it "32 Super Carry"?
Well, I think it's actually a really clever decision on their part, because
if you say "32 calibre pistol" to someone in guns,
they immediately think of that as, "Oh .32, .32 ACP, underpowered, wimpy."
Whereas the connotation that ".30 calibre" tends to take is,
".30 calibre: battle rifle, M14, G3, FAL, much better than that puny 5.56 mouse gun. 30 stronk."
And so Federal, I'm pretty sure, deliberately went for the .30 calibre rifle association
instead of the .32 calibre pistol association.
Anyway, that's all just marketing.
Of course the advantage there is your smaller diameter cartridge
you're able to stack more into the same length of magazines.
So it's approximately a 20% increase for .30 calibre.
So where you get 5 rounds of 9mm, you get 6 rounds of .30.
By the way, Federal's original intent apparently was to make the 30 Super Carry
an intermediary to bridge the gap between .380 and 9x19.
But where they actually ended up when the cartridge was all said and done,
is a round that essentially matches 9mm performance and feel.
And in fact I had a chance to shoot the Shield Plus in both 9 and .30 side by side at Shot Show.
So 9mm.
- Do you need a palate cleanser?
- What do we think? - I cannot tell any discernible difference in felt recoil.
- Between 9 and 30 Super? - Between 9 and 30.
Anyway, comparing this to 9mm here you have basically the same overall length.
That's why these fit in the same basic size of pistols.
If someone makes a ... sub-compact 9mm with a locked breech,
it will be pretty easy to make that pistol in .30.
Now one of the downsides, compared to say the compatibility between .40 and .357 SIG,
unfortunately the case heads are substantially different in size here.
So you cannot simply swap barrels to change a 9 to a .30.
That sort of conversion requires a new ... breech face, which essentially requires a new slide.
The magazines have to be different because .30 calibre rounds will
basically pop through the feed lips of a 9mm magazine.
So this isn't such an easy conversion as, well, 5.56 to 300 Blackout for example.
But the overall size is similar, so that ... for manufacturers it's not that big a deal
to ... build a .30 calibre version of a 9mm pistol.
A couple of pros, a couple of cons to this cartridge.
Let's start with the pros because they're more interesting to me.
Where do I think this cartridge is useful and will find a good home?
Well, the obvious starting place is the really sub-compact carry pistols,
like exactly this sort of thing.
... It's not accidental that this is one of the pistols
that was first introduced along with the cartridge.
17 rounds in this thing is ... a stupidly large number of cartridges.
It was not very long ago that if you wanted a pistol this size
it was going to be a single-stack 9mm, it was going to have 7 or maybe 8 rounds in it.
And there were a lot of people I think who would say,
"Well I'll carry that, but that's not that much ammunition,
and I'll carry a spare magazine as well."
And I think like one of the overlooked benefits of having 17 rounds already in this thing
is there's really no need to carry a spare magazine
if you were of the opinion that two magazines for your single-stack gun was sufficient.
And you get a couple of benefits as a result.
One of them is you just don't have one extra thing that you have to deal with.
And also the gun is going to be more reliable.
You don't have to worry about doing a reload or running dry on ammunition,
if all of your two magazines are already essentially in the first magazine.
It also means you don't have your spare magazine floating around
in your pocket filling up with pocket lint.
So that I think is a definite place where this cartridge has a real place.
Secondly, I think it has a very interesting potential future in both PDWs and PCCs.
I would say submachine guns, but I'm not sure there's that much
developmental motive for new submachine guns.
If there is, I think a 30 Super Carry submachine gun would be pretty darn cool.
That's pretty much the MAS 38 which is ... like a regular submachine gun, but smaller.
I think it would be really interesting to have
something like a Brügger & Thomet USW in 30 Super Carry.
This form factor of gun already uses extended magazines to begin with,
because it's not meant to be concealed.
So it doesn't matter if you've got a little extra magazine sticking out of the grip.
Well, this is 21 rounds of 9mm, the 30 Super Carry you're getting 20% more.
So that's going to turn this into 25, maybe 26 rounds.
And if we really want to get into it with like full-size PCC magazines,
then this is sort of the comparison that you're looking at.
This is a MAS 38 magazine in 7.65 French,
which is dimensionally essentially identical to 30 Super Carry.
That's a 9mm magazine. These two have the same capacity.
So if I took this one and rebuilt it for 30 Super Carry, I'm going to be getting 36, 37 rounds.
That starts to be a pretty substantial increase, that's kind of like
taking every one of your standard AR-15 PCC mags
and throwing a major extended base plate on it.
Except it's not actually physically longer,
it's the same length mag, you're just getting 20% more cartridges.
... I think there is some question of how many rounds
do you really need to have in a sub-compact pistol?
At what point do you have enough
that ... potentially lowering the effectiveness of the cartridge
in order to get more isn't really a good trade off.
In a 9mm PCC I think the calculus on that decision is rather different.
Now of course this is going to be subject to approval of 30 Super Carry
as a competition cartridge, that's where we see PCCs getting a lot of their use.
And as the rules currently stand in a lot of the competition venues,
9mm is specified as the minimum cartridge.
So you can't use a .32, it has to be a 9 or a .38.
It will be interesting to see if any of those competition organisations
change their rules to allow a cartridge like 30 Super Carry that would meet the requirements
in terms of power factor, just not in terms of bullet diameter.
Speaking of which, cartridge power is something that
a lot of people have brought up as a negative to 30 Super Carry.
Essentially it gets you the same terminal effectiveness as 9 Parabellum.
There's certainly going to be some debate on that I know already.
But ... in practical terms, if we're not trying to count every individual foot pound
and millimetre of expansion, you're basically getting the same thing.
There are going to be 9mm loads that will be more effective,
but you can reach that same baseline of terminal effectiveness with 30 Super Carry.
That was basically the intent of the cartridge.
And that's why the pressure has been increased,
... the increased pressure is to make sure that a relatively high velocity can be achieved
from a relatively short barrel in order to get terminal effectiveness that matches 9mm.
In fact it would be interesting to see some experimentation done
on effectiveness of both cartridges out of particularly short barrels.
Because a lot of this stuff is done with a 4 or a 5 inch test barrel.
And I'd like to see it with a 2 or 3 inch barrel,
because some of those 9mm loadings that look good on paper out of 4 or 5 inches
kind of drop off with a much shorter barrel.
The 30 Super Carry with its substantially higher chamber pressure
(we're talking 50,000 psi rated pressure), it might not drop off quite so much.
I don't know, I haven't seen the data, and I haven't done that experimenting myself.
My own personal opinion is that the numbers I see on 30 Super Carry are perfectly adequate.
I'm not one of those people who thinks 9mm Parabellum
is the absolute bare minimum of acceptable terminal performance.
I think 9 is just fine, and if I have a 30 Super Carry load that's 5% or even 10% less, that's still just fine.
Especially if I'm getting 20% more ammunition in exchange for it.
There is a matter of cartridge cost,
Federal plans on the cartridge costing the same amount as .380 ACP.
This is of course more than 9 Parabellum.
Pretty much everything is always going to be more than 9 Parabellum because of economy of scale.
I see people suggesting that that's a big deal,
because you need to be firing many thousands of rounds per year
to maintain proper proficiency with your carry gun.
Is that a good idea? Yeah, of course.
The more you shoot, the more proficient you are with the gun, the better.
There's a certain level of proficiency below which it's really kind of irresponsible
to be carrying around a gun and planning to use it.
But at the same time, I think the number of people who actually do put
multiple thousands of rounds per year through their carry pistols is actually pretty darn small.
The vast majority of people are going to be buying a couple of boxes a year,
plinking with it a couple of times, and mostly sticking it in a sock drawer or in a holster.
And for those people the difference in cost of ammunition really isn't that big of a deal.
So I think ammo cost issues are a bit over-hyped by people.
Especially people who tend to be really hardcore shooters,
who are going to be shooting many thousands of rounds,
unlike I think a lot of the people who are going to be actually buying this.
... Let's see how this actually shoots. I should point out by the way, that
this very same day today, James Reeves over at TFB TV is
also posting a video on the Smith & Wesson Shield Plus in 30 Super Carry.
His video is largely a review of the pistol itself.
So if you're really interested in the details of this particular pistol
you should definitely check out his video.
I'm more interested in the cartridge itself, but we of course have to do some shooting.
So let's see how this handles. I'm at about 10 to 15 yards here.
A couple of mini silhouettes.
I mean, I can't really find much to complain about with that.
And I got 13 rounds in this thing, instead of the typical 10,
maybe 12 that you would get ... with an extended magazine.
If I drop the extended magazine in, I got 16 plus one in the chamber if I want it.
To me, that's the really cool part.
So here's one way to assess the "stopping power", so to speak, of 30 Super Carry,
let's see if it can run a spinner.
With 9mm Parabellum out of my P365 I can do this in 10 or 11 rounds.
Well, I've got 16 here, see if I can pull it off.
- Over! - Alright!
So I wasted a couple of shots at the top,
I should know better than to try and force it at the top.
But regardless, even though I dumped 3 or 4 extras at it,
and I was empty at the end, cleaned a spinner.
If 30 Super Carry is underpowered, it's not that much underpowered.
I should also add on here, I've become a huge fan of red dots on pistols.
They give you all the same advantages you get with red dots on rifles.
And the technology is good enough now that pistol red dots are perfectly capable
... of withstanding the impact and the forces of being mounted on pistol slides.
And I think, especially on little tiny pistols like these
where you have a short sight radius to begin with, the advantages of a red dot are really fantastic.
So I went ahead and put a little Micro Swampfox on this one.
It's one of the budget red dots and it's worked great for me, real happy with it.
Got 16 more rounds of this, because these magazines just like never end.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.
Thanks for watching.