Now I'm going to go ahead and warn y'all that this post is going to ramble some...it's not going to be just about XTP's, but about bullets in general....first off, very few bullets really satisfy me, very few....and each and every gun/round has a different style/type that I like.....
Traditional straight wall revolver rounds are seriously restricted by velocity...really, their lack of it.....heavy weight, thick jacketed bullets act like Hardcast bullets....and in my opinion, that is worse than horrible, Hardcast bullets provide caliber sized holes, the wide meplat discussion is garbage, garbage to me, I want more, if you want to argue, shoot a deer through the lungs with a wide meplat HC bullet, watch it run a country mile before succumbing to lead poisoning and finally croacking and look at the hole, it will not impress by my standards....pity full tissue damage, pity full blood trails and overall lousy performance.....let me say that I'm speaking of deer sized animals. If one was going after larger game, I'd for one would want a lot more horsepower than a traditional revolver round.....that's just me
I've found that on deer sized game that traditional SJHP bullets work amazingly....a lot of tissue damage, a lot of blood loss, and basic mass destruction on (heart, liver, lungs, etc)
The knock for me with XTP's is with the ones that have Mag Jackets....they are so damn thick and the cores are so hard that they rarely expand and I emphasize rarely.....which leads to piss poor performance....the 400 gr XTP in the .475 will not readily expand at less than 1,650 fps.....good damn luck in the Linebaugh and you can forget it in the 480 Ruger....the 275 gr Barnes XTB is the best revolver bullet in .475.........with that said, I can take the 400 gr XTP in my 475/350 Competitor and the bullet works wonderfully........the exact same can be said with heavyweight Speer Bullets......they do NOT expand reliably at typical revolver velocities
In Swift revolver bullets, the cannelure is too high up and eats too much case capacity.....they are utterly reliable, but at slower velocities than other loads utilizing different bullets.....see, I'm hard to please......with all of this rambling, probably 95 percent of everyone that reads this will only shoot deer with their handguns, and that's ok/cool, and deer are really easy to kill....so, blast them with whatever shoots the best, and at the best price