d4dave1..........Recoil is a product of bullet weight, velocity, powder charge and rifle weight, caliber doesn't really factor into it, so it's a matter of how one loads his cartridges. The performance expectations are in the range of the 243 Win/6mm Rem/6mm-284 so the recoil will be virtually the same in the same weight rifle. I'm not going to buy a reamer initially for the 23X222 Rem mag, but it was discussed as one of the potential family, perhaps the smallest of the family. I have a gunsmith friend who's an old bench shooter and is interested in building a 23 on the 6mm BR case, this is a super efficient case and should be quite interesting to see what it does in 23 cal. Who knows, maybe it'll be the new bench rest darling.
It is not hard to outperform the 223 in my opinion, it was designed with a lot of compromises in mind, for the military, and was also designed as a fully automatic cartridge exclusively. The criteria for a full auto cartridge are significantly different from that of, say a benchrest cartridge, or a bolt action rifle cartridge. I'm not saying they can't cross over but their design criteria necessitate features that may not make the best cartridge for that bore size. The 222 RM is a much superior cartridge from a design standpoint and can and has been built in a rifle capable of benchrest accuracy, I'm not aware of any bench shooter ever using the 223 for competition, I could be wrong, but I'm not aware of it.
As to your last question, the answer is a faltering probably..........I will have to do a bunch of "wringing out" of this caliber before I'd be willing to build for general consumption. There will never be factory ammo or even load data for any of my little cult family, so I'll be "flying in the dark", with these cartridges. Extrapolation can guide quite well but one never knows what curves will be thrown at them when playing with wildcats. I have a couple very experienced guys for 2 of the family to wring out, will be looking for more as the days draw nigh. Wildcatting requires a firm grasp of how the pressure curves for certain powders, in certain bore sizes, with certain case capacities, behind certain bullet weights, will function. Most very experienced handloaders would have a good idea of what powders would be best suited to given case capacities to bore size ratios. I am going to try to work up loads with at least 6 different powders within the appropriate burn rates for each case with additional ones best suited to the different bullet weights we are going to use.
Hope this answers your questions.
Douglas
PS, one must also consider the safety of future generations who may encounter these rifles and have zero data from which to work, that is why it is imperative to work up data for each cartridge and publish it in one form or another. It would be nice if the data were still available 50 years from now when this whole experiment is long forgotten, but some rifles may still exist.
