Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Long Range Hunting kind of new to turret twisting.....maybe a stupid question but...

You have been given good advice. I'll just add this: when I got a Jeep, my buddy described Jeep ownership as "Finacial sodomy, plus joining a cult!".... LR shooting is like that.

Couple suggestions.... run a Tall Target Test at 100 yards on your existing scopes. That will tell you lots about your scopes mechanically, and plus that, help wrap your brain around the math of it. Look for things like the actual POI drifting left or right relative to the vertical stadia.... windage changes when you've only dialed elevation.... failures to repeat (big groups) as you dial between shots.... Etc. Maybe what you have is awesome and will do the job! One way to find out.

This is a pic of such a test I ran years ago. I was dialing 4 MOA between every shot. See the error in windage at 8 MOA? That scope still sufficed to kill steel plates to 900 or so and a deer at 600, but that's not ideal.



(Please note that this is really more of a "medium target test".... and that I was not super-rigorous about it. You can get as geeky as you want with these tests. However, even simplified ones as above can tell you a LOT in the early going. )

A similar test on my Swaro 3-10 revealed that the mechanical tracking was not true to the vertical reticle stadia. As I dialed in more elevation, holding the reticle plumb to the plumb-line on the target, the POI drifted off to the right, to where it was about 1.5 MOA off in windage at 16 MOA of elevation, if memory serves. Other than THAT, it tracks and repeats pretty well! But that's a big deal. This is a very messy target as I was running a similar test on another scope. It was never meant for public consumption, but I'm including it so you can maybe see what I'm trying to say here. 1000 words and all that.