Gong size

Resurrecting a topic from several years ago; care to share what size gongs you use and at what distances please ?

What do you find the advantages are from using those sizes at the respective distances ?

Are the gongs sized this way to give a typical hit rate in certain conditions ?

It would be interesting to also see the sizing in MOA or target-ring equivalent.

Not so interested in really large plates that in general capture all shots as these are like targets, more interested in the sizing of the hit-or-miss, all-or-nothing style.

What is your application @Puffin? Target Shooting or hunting?
For hunting larger game we very rarely use targets bigger than 250mm squares as we think this reasonably represents the chest area on a red deer. We do occasionally use smaller targets at closer distances in our hunter's events. Once you start using target sizes bigger than a "kill area" on game at a hunters event it just becomes a target shoot.


For our longer range precision target shooting events we use some simple minimum target size recommendations (1MIL=3.6MOA):

Position	50m – 300m	300m – 650m	650m – 1000m+
Supported Prone	0.3MIL	0.4MIL	0.5MIL
Sitting	0.5MIL	1.0MIL	N/A
Kneeling	1.2MIL	N/A	N/A
Supported Sitting / Kneeling	0.5MIL	0.6MIL	0.8MIL
Standing	2.0MIL	N/A	N/A
Supported Standing	0.6MIL	1.0MIL	N/A

Keep in mind these are minimum target size guidelines only and the typical hit rate on targets sized to the minimums is well less than 50% based upon the results from our last 5 longer range events with first round hit percentages coming in about 20% for the shorter distances and down to 10% or less on the longer distances. These percentages don't look very good on their own but I am a big believer in that adversity makes people better and we have proven with several clubs that a bit of practice and using smaller targets than they are used to certainly improves peoples performance. We try to set our events to the ability level of the competitors we expect and with the aim that everyone gets something but no one gets everything.

Thanks Gillie, that is very complete info and just what I was looking for, much appreciated.

Been doing this for a little while and thankfully my engineer mind likes statistics... meaning I have a whole bunch of target size, distance, hit/miss statistics here from something like 25 different events over the last 5 or 6 years...

I also have a set of guidelines for rimfire targets out to 200m or so as well.