I use the 3.5 inch for turkeys,in our family we have a Remington 870,a Benelli SBE,a Benelli SBE II,and a Franchi 912. All of these guns have 3.5 inch chambers and all shoot denser patterns with 3.5 shells at turkey pattern targets.
But when I take any of them waterfowl hunting,I use 3 inch loads,the recoil of a series of 3.5 inch loads is too much for me.
But with only one or maybe two shots at a turkey,I want the densest load posible,and the 3.5 inch shells just have more shot in them and put more on the target in my tests.
If I wanted to shoot 3.5 inch loads at waterfowl,they would come from a gas operated 10 gauge to reduce felt recoil because of the heavier weight of the 10 gauge autoloaders.
I am with you.
I really do not care if the pattern is a little more uniform from a 3-D perspective; the shot is traveling supersonic out of the barrel. The shot string is not very long either. People are talking like it is ten feet long with a 3.5 shell and six inches long with a 2.75 shell. What is so bad about a few fliers also? There are 225 #6 shot per ounce. A 3.5 shell shoots 1/2 ounce more shot at the same velocity vs a 2.75 shell; that is 112 more #6 shot than a 2.75 and 56 than a 3 inch.
For turkeys and predators the 3.5 is superior to 3 and 2.75 in the same chokes shooting lead; but there needs to be more 3.5 predator loads. I would not want the recoil for upland and small game hunting due to the number of shots taken, and that amount of shot is not desired for these species. That number of shot is desired for turkeys and predators past 35 yards or so.
On a moving target that is moving around 40mph it is moving about 59 fps. If the shot has slowed to 900 fps it is still moving over 15 times faster than the target. That means if the target moves 1 inch the shot moves 15 inches. From a 3-D perspective I do not think that a pattern is much longer (or deeper)if any longer than 15 inches, so the target could move 1 huge inch from the time the most forward shot reaches it until the most rearward reaches it, so what.
