Thread: Testing a conventional approach to load development

Some further reflections -

1. I would not load this bullet in this rifle with this brass/powder. I now know this load does not meet my hit-probability requirements for precision (0.07MRAD mean radius or better, so that precision is not the limiting factor on 0.3MRAD targets).

2. I did not know that this load did not meet my requirements after 36 rounds of the conventional process. Often it is stated that "3 shot groups can't tell you how good something is, but they can tell you how bad it is and then you can rule it out". None of the 3-shot groups come close to representing the true size of the cone of fire and I could not rule the load out after 12x 3 shot groups. Clearly it was at least 0.895 MOA, as that was the largest 3-shot group - but that would meet requirements.

3. Nor did I know the true velocity consistency as measured by SD. 3-shot SDs/ES are useless to represent the true velocity consistency of a load.

I did not know enough to make a decision. A single 15-shot group of a single arbitrary load selected to be most likely to be functional would have given me much more useful information.