Gale McMillan: I have no doubt that in 1983 You and J.Haskins indeed developed a 416/338 wildcat round for the Navy. My comprehension of the matter is that Malcolme Cooper aproached Lapua wanting a source for round aproximaltely equal of this wild cat's dimensions and ballistics. As far as I know Lapua people were unsatisfied with the marginal between the work pressure and the pressure of case failure with the necked down .416Rigby case and thus chose to recalculate and change the inside dimensions of the case to gain desired pressure margin.
There is no shadow of doubt which round has been the inspiration in the design of the .338Lapua, but in My world view the party that does the final drawings that differ from the previous _and_ has them CIP and/or SAAMI certified is the developer. It is in the control of the party that owns the rights of the product to name the sources of the potential inspiration or not to do so. That might be the main reason why .44Remington Magnum is called that instead of .44Keith Magnum
Maybe my logic limbs here but I see it this way: Malcolme Cooper had vision of market demand for certain size and power rifle cartidge and had a more or less ready concept of filling it. Now He sort of a subcontracted the task of final solution design to an other party that being Lapua whereas group of people perform the necessary stress analyzis etc. What I fail to follow is that what is the correlation between the persons that did the work on the cartidge at the Lapua facilities and the desicion of industrial manufacture of a weapon for the round by other company than Accuracy International or A.I. itself as the work was done and the round was CIP spec'ed.
I'll try to contact a former student of the technical university that I'm presently student of. He works for Lapua product developement so He propably has chance of finding out that who were the persons involved in the .338 project and thus I could get in touch with them.
And yes a sample of those 416/338 "Navy" rounds/cases would be highly apreciated as they appear to be the ancestors of the .338Lapua allthou U would have to send them over here to Finnland
I'll mail you my address off the forum so that the local McMillan benchresters don't gather here to turn my place into bonfire
Best wishes:
Gattling
PS. I get back to the dust signature matter in the sniping, but now I have to get off line since I have aprox. 5hrs time to sleep and have rifle match coming up tomorrow.