I admit this discussion baffles me because it seems more about 'what is the most powerful rifle a human could shoot based on modern cartridges' rather than actual monster hunting. In the former it's all about producing the biggest kinetic energy value within human recoil tolerance limits, whereas the latter is more complicated.
If you want to figure out what the biggest rifle a human could fire is you need to decide things like 'how complicated do I want my weapon to get and do I care about reliability or mechanical complexity' and 'do I need to be mobile or can I lie down'. In either case there are a lot of things you can do to generate high KE guns without making recoil a problem. If you can lay down, you might go with a 'recoilless' concept and/or a really good muzzle brake (like the
RT-20. If you're looking for technological doodads you could use a variation on recoilles known as
RAVEN. If you need your rifleman to be more mobile then it gets trickier, but you still have muzzle brakes and/or soft-recoil/fire-out-of-battery concepts (but each has its own issues) alongside various 'hyperburst' or 'balanced recoil' concepts (although the latter I hear only works with SCHV to be truly effective. And the former is only useful for burst firing.. and both are vastly more complex guns.)
If you're actually hunting monsters, its going to depend on what you're hunting and what its vulnerabilities are. Not all monsters will require antimaterial guns, and stuff that makes good AP typically makes for poor wounding unless you get pretty complex (read: expensive), creative or high-tech with the ammo. Something that is largely fleshy but regenerative (trolls, vampires, etc.) might need less AP and more wounding potential (fragmenting rounds, buckshot ammo, etc.) to make large holes and with ammo designed to inhibit regenerative properties. More biological/less magical 'monsters' would probably be different, and large monsters vs small monsters is yet another category (although something dinosaur sized might need something closer to 'antimaterial rifle' or 'man portable autocannon...)
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Originally Posted by lwcamp
If you really don't like uranium for some reason, tungsten, tungsten carbide, iridium, osmium, platinum, and gold all have the density. Gold might be a bit too deformable for high penetration against hard armor, but at the low velocity you will get from a shotgun I doubt you'd see much difference in any of the others. Don't expect to see pyrophoric action from uranium at these speeds, either.
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If your monster is squishy (EG no exoskeleton, outer shell, or something like that) then you might want 'soft' bullet materials to deform/fragment inside the body to make large wounds whilst also inhibiting other defensive mechanisms (like the aforementioned regeneration.) Silver and gold would be ideal for these given their 'mystical' associations but also high density and relative softness. DU might be useful if you have an enemy harmed by incendiary effects (pyrophoric) and they also happen to be a 'hard' enough target they can trigger the self-sharpening, but I suspect it might have limited utility unless you adopted some RIFTS-style 'radiation harms supernaturals' concept.
A high sectional density would help with range and energy retention at range though, although a 'hard' AP-type round is also prone to over-penetration with little/no deformation (meaning little energy deposited on the target)
Again I think the nature of the ammo (and weapon) will ultimately be tailored to the kind of monster threat you're fighting and there can be a ton of options there.