That's not entirely correct. In Sweden and Norway the 6.5x55 has been the military standard cartridge throughout most of the 20th century. Since rifles and ammunition weren't as inexpensive as they are now, the standard issue rifles, which every Home Guard member took home after his conscript service, were used for hunting too. Moose are pretty big animals, to achieve suffiecient penetration out of the barely adequate but common 6.5x55 heavy, slow bullets were required, since there was no bonded core technology available. Partitioned core bullets were often too expensive for the majority of hunters too.
The heavy bullets were all of round nose design, bc was never considered when designing european big game hunting bullets back then.
The argument that the 6.5x55 has to be a good moose/big game cartridge since it's been used in scandinavia for so long a time, which you usually read in american not so much in european forums, is not valid. The 6.5x55 has been used because it was the most commonly available cartridge, not because it was better than more reasonable choices (8x57, 9.3x57 -62) and was adapted to it's role by using heavy round nose bullets. It's still being used because it has been used traditionally.
The 6.5x55 is a neat little cartridge, pretty good on european boar, roe deer &c, which usually weigh less than 150#, but it's far from being a good big game cartridge.
To the point of heavy european bullets, they have always been developed for terminal ballistic purposes. When external ballistics were an issue, for example in mountainous regions on goats and sheep hunts, fast lightweight bullets were used too. For example the 6.5x68 was developed for this purpose using bullets in the 100gr range.
Sorry for the rant, I know it's neither applicable to the threads topic, the 6.5x55 is perfectly appropriate for the intended use, nor completely to north of 53's post.
