Mark
Things are kind hard going in the Royce camp. I have a girl friend that wants to spend all our time either hiking or looking for elk, so most of my time is spent doing one or the other or recovering from it. As you know, the wolves have decimated the elk herds, and yesterday in 4 hours of hard elk looking all we could find was 3026 elk, about 75 bighorn sheep and maybe 500 antelope.
Went in a different direction a few days before that and it was worse, saw maybe 300 tops. That was down around Mule Deer's baliwick, figure he must be keeping them shot off. Even our best day a week or so ago, we only could find was about 5000. Trying to find a new hobby, but the senior center has barred me, I think it was that deal about me butchering the deer in the activity room. What the hell is the good of an activity room if you can't do your butchering in there?
Back to the non- AO scope-
I think parallax is a lot bigger demon in trying to hit something in the field than most people realize. And, in trying to get to the point where I could hit a hay stack past 300 yards, I discovered, in my world that sucess in hitting things past 300 yards is a matter of doing a lot of little things correctly, and that doing one thing wrong could poleaxe the whole [bleep].
For example, even with wind flags, you never get the wind quite right, so a better BC gives you maybe a 1/16 MOA there. Having consistent velocity give you another 1/8 , and consistent rifle grip a 1/32-. In my experience, reaming flash holes reduced fliers. Using a powder that has less temp variations helps a little. Rifle cant can cause deviations.
A rifle that shoots 3/4 inch groups but prints those groups 44 inches high one day, three inches left the next and slings them low another day is worse than a rifle that will shoot 1 1/2 inch groups to the same place all year long.
Of course, all this is just my own opinions and observations, and I will yield any claim of expertise or even compentency.
Fred
