At the risk of plagiarism.
X never ever marks the spot .
95% of your research will be done in the library.
Go try stuff . Even if it doesn't work you'll learn that it didn't work .
I had a hard time figuring out a certain group of relationships in cast bullets. More specifically start pressure, acceleration, and duration , but not just burn dwell time but how it all related the mechanical duration in the barrel
Now at this point I have to explain that I once drove a truck that would literally flood stall on high octane fuel because it simply didn't have enough chamber pressure to burn the fuel even taching 3100 rpms . Get the octane down to 98 or so it would run on the highway but warm on a hot day it didn't idle for beans over 89 octane . So it it goes with a 61' IHC 345 that makes a whopping 145 BHP at 4400 rpm . It ran great on the 84-86 stuff . I suppose we could have moved the timing back to 0 and tried it Duplex the 135 Oct av gas but it was only 65 gallons so no point really .
I had to drop back and figure why my 06' did what it was doing......after I fixed a lot of bugs in the barrel . . So I loaded Red Dot under a 200 gr Spitzer cast . I guess I started at like 5-6 gr and worked it up until it blew out the groups . That happened about 1200 fps . Now there are at least a couple of y'all going well of course it did and your 8.5" twist didn't help but it wasn't hurting anything at that point . Then I started Unique just below that it went all the way to 1500 fps MV .... I don't remember what I used next , I had little dabs of 800x , Blue Dot , Steel and something else in the same area . Then I jumped to I 4350 even patched the design was only good for 1800 fps in the fast twist with a huntable alloy . I learned from that and stuff from all of the tomes of reading started to not only fit together but really make sense .
I went on and applied what I learned there to pistols and their carbines . You can't get enough of anything slower than about 4227 in a 158 gr 357 to get anything useful out of it in a carbine and have it feed . But a 45 Colts with a 350 and H322 is the reason I just went ahead and bought the 45-70 . <20kpsi in a 16" barrel will get you almost 1300 fps , but only 600 fps in a 7.5" RBH .
Sometimes you just have to load up a bunch of stuff and go shoot a bunch of stuff up so the book stuff makes sense .
Science was baffled by the Bagdad battery for decades. Then this college kid says "has anybody built a new one and filled it to see what it does ?" Sure enough copper plates in a clay box full of grape juice made it's own surface charge ....it also sulfated out pretty fast . Maybe it's not a battery . California adds sulfates to get that 12-14% alcohol rating so maybe the Bagdaddies just wanted to hop up the wine .