The .460 Weatherby Magnum is a belted, bottlenecked rifle cartridge, developed by Roy Weatherby in 1957. The cartridge is based on the .378 Weatherby Magnum necked up to accept the bullet. The original .378 Weatherby Magnum parent case was inspired by the .416 Rigby. The .460 Weatherby Magnum was designed as an African dangerous game rifle cartridge for the hunting of heavy, thick skinned dangerous game. Prior to the Weatherby's arrival, the .600 Nitro Express had been the most powerful cartridge but the .460 Weatherby Magnum eclipsed this, and was the world's most powerful commercially available sporting cartridge for 29 years until the advent of the .700 Nitro Express. The .460 launches a bullet at a chronographed velocity of from a barrel, measuring of muzzle energy. Cartridge history Roy Weatherby had expected the .378 Weatherby Magnum to make some headway in the African continent but believed that his cartridge was being bypassed for low-velocity, big-bore cartridges by professional hunters who he felt were resistant to change. Furthermore, new regulations prohibiting the hunting of heavy, thick skinned, dangerous game with sub-.40 caliber (10.16 mm) cartridges were being enacted in some African countries. These regulations would essentially ban the use of all previous Weatherby cartridges for the hunting of elephant, African Cape buffalo and rhinoceros. In response to these factors, Weatherby believed that it was necessary to provide hunters a Weatherby cartridge that could be used to hunt African dangerous game in the countries which had legislated against hunting with sub-.40 caliber rifles. He accomplished this by necking up the .378 Weatherby Magnum case to accept a .458 caliber bullet. He named the new cartridge the ".460 Weatherby Magnum". The first rifles for the .460 Weatherby Magnum were built on Brevex Magnum Mauser action. However, Weatherby was not the first cartridge designer to neck up the .378 Weatherby Magnum to .45 caliber (11.6 mm). That distinction belongs to John Buhmiller, a gunsmith and hunter from Montana. Buhmiller named his cartridge the ".45 Weatherby". He had success with the cartridge in Africa shooting Cape buffalo and rogue elephants in 1956, a year before Weatherby began work on his own .45-caliber cartridge. Norma Precision of Sweden was the first and only manufacturer of .460 Weatherby Magnum cases and ammunition which carried the Weatherby name and has done so under contract from Weatherby. During Weatherby's partnership with J.P. Sauer/Dynamit-Nobel, production at Norma ceased and shifted