Thread: How to get your rifle to shoot less than MOA

Okay now that I have real internet again, I have a couple of points to make.

- 3 shot groups, particularly in isolation, do not give enough information to infer the true precision of a rifle. What is the true precision of a rifle? The maximum deviation of shots absent shooter error. A 3 shot group, from any particularly half-decent rifle, is likely to be much smaller than the maximum group size or "true precision". Look at Distant Stalker's target. In this case, there may be other factors that cause the apparent "POI shift" of the groups, but regardless it's a perfect example: multiple three shot groups that taken in isolation are ~*half moa*~ but when overlaid to give a truer picture of the precision of the rifle (more information!!) tell a different story. There's human error causing poi change (probably more than most shooters on here would like to admit), there's rifle error causing apparent POI change (again, possibly more than most would like to admit from their "half moa rifle"), and there's a combination of the two which is what we all will likely see. A single 3 shot group, even if it is "half moa" doesn't mean your rifle is a half moa rifle. Even multiple 3 shot "half moa" groups don't mean that necessarily, unless you take them in totality and compare mean displacement from point of aim. Firing multiple groups on one piece of paper allows you to compare them, and forces you to be honest with YOURSELF which is important, as it's too easy to handwave things in favour of the more ideal outcome...

A picture:




Hopefully this illustrates my point. A picture tells a thousand words...


- Next point: why should we care if our rifle is ~*half moa*~ or not? It may functionally shoot half moa 3 shot groups from a certain perspective, but does that mean we can hit a half moa targets? From a practical standpoint, that should be more important. In anything where we're trying to truely measure the precision of the rifle, ie competition or load development, wouldn't we want to do it in a way that gives us more information? It's become such a ridiculous point of pride to shoot pretty groups though that the end goal of actually getting information from them is often lost. Ie a forum member whom shall remain nameless not firing a fifth shot so as not to "ruin the group". Well you're not shooting a competition so the group size doesn't count for your score, what information are you looking for that a 5th shot would ruin it? If finishing your group would "ruin it", why were you shooting a group anyway as that's obviously not the best way to go about it? Obviously groups do help with information such as mean point of impact for zeroing, and obtaining the precision of a load for load development - but the more information for these, the better, to do it properly. I can't count the number of times I've seen people at the range shoot 2 or 3 shot groups to zero and been chasing their zero around the page. A combination of lack of information about true mean POI and bad shooting? Most likely. I think the internet has also fucked with expectations in that everyone posts pretty hand selected 3 shot groups. Internet group syndrome.

-Shooting groups is different shooting to hitting things. Again see Distant Stalker's targets. If we take his statement that it was his shooting causing the change in POI at face value, that tells us that regardless of whether you can shoot a nice ".5 moa" group, or 6 of them, it doesn't actually mean a damn thing in regards to HITTING things. But the emphasis on the internet and in magazines is all on "look at this 3 shot tiny group". When was the last time you saw someone posting about trying to improve the consistency of their shooting or asking how to?



This is actually a very good practical discussion and it'd be great if we could keep it that way please