While reading the current thread “Why is it called a boattail?”, I began to think about bullet shapes for subsonic bullets. The ones I’m familiar with are pistol bullets and 22LR bullets. Most of them seem to have a slightly elongated round nose and a pretty flat base. The slightly elongated and round nose looks like the forward end of a jet airliner, or a propeller driven airliner back in the day. The flat base looks nothing like the back end of these subsonic aircraft which have a long tapered shape in the rear. It’s obvious why the flat to nearly flat bases are used in short case applications, but it does seem like a possible opportunity for better drag performance to use heavy bullets with very long pointed tales in rifle cartridges with longer cases, or medium length cases in longer actions.
