For the gurus here:
It is pretty well accepted that scopes work best when near the center of their adjustment range. This begs the question of “How much adjustment is too much?” More specifically, “How much adjustment are you willing to tolerate before you consider adjustable mounts?”
Let us make the following assumptions:
- We are talking about “set and forget”, not ranging and adjusting.
- We assume too much adjustment is a combination of windage and elevation, specifically (following the Pythagorean Theorem):
Total Adjustment = Square root (windage^2 + elevation^2)
- We will say “too much” is some percentage of the total adjustment in either windage or elevation (which are usually the same, or at least close.)
Example: Elevation and windage adjustment range are both 52 MOA. We center the scope and find that to zero requires “12 MOA up and 8 MOA left.” This works out to:
Square root (12^2 + 8^2) = 14.4 MOA
14.4 = 27.7% of 52 (because 14.4 / 52 = 0.277)
So, how much is too much, 25%, 50%, 75% . . . what is your number?
Note: Assuming 52 MOA is the total adjustment up/down, right/left, we have only one half that amount from center, or 26 MOA. This means that in our example we have used 55.4% of the available adjustment (14.4 / 26 = 0.554). Either one works all long as everyone understands and agrees what the percentage is based on.
For our discussion, let us use the total adjustment range, i.e. 52 MOA in our example.
