To prevent bent bullet tips. The tips on the Nosler Partitions I am shooting now get nearly bent off and I figure if the bullet was designed to preform like that it wouldn't have a tip in the first place. Also I am open to any information on how bent bullet tips affect bullet flight, accuracy, and terminal performance.

I assume they are getting battered around in the box magazine while you're shooting. You can get around this by shooting Ballistic Tips, but in Montana you have the option of elk, bear, and moose, so you want your Partitions, you're a smart man! My dad used to use Partitions out of the .30-06 before the advent of Ballistic Tips for deer. The noses always came out flattened and he had the same question you did, "How does this affect bullet flight?" To answer your question, he took and mashed 5 tips intentionally and also had five good tips. He shot a ten shot group at 200 yds. with his regular old M70, mixing the blunt tips in with the good tips. They shot a sub-moa group at 200 yds. He said, "That's good enough for me, the game won't tell the difference." And the game can't tell the difference. Unless the tips are severely bent off to one side, it won't make a difference that you or an elk can tell. A different matter is if the tip is bent way over to one side, then it affects the stability of the bullet because the centrifugal force during the rotation of the bullet could cause yaw, but I could be wrong, there are more knowledgeable physicists on this forum that could answer that question better than I. FYI, when Swift A-Frames came out, the all had a "protected point" to prevent this problem in hard-recoiling rifles. The Partition is available in this also. The just leave the exposed lead on the fron out and have a unifrom blunt tip to at the jacket. I hope this helps.
Yardbird