Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Long Range Hunting Do many here use MILS?

Pretty sure I've shot a match or two. Also well aware that trying to mil living objects is not in any way accurate enough to get a range to shoot an animal.

I know I grew up and did my initial training on moa in a SFP scope. I chugged along for about 15 years of shooting, even spending the last few teaching at several schools geared towards law enforcement precision rifle. As much time as I put into all of that and I spent about 15 minutes with mil in a first plane glass and I was sold completely.

I have taught my kids and my wife, all new shooters, to simply read the reticle and get their hits. I dont think about my hold over cards as 26" of drop at x yards or 13" of drift at x yards in x winds, they are simply 3.3 mils of elevation or .5 mils of drift etc. The other beauty of a proper mil reticle and mil adjustments is the option to dial or use holdover as needed, Whether you go with mils or moa to make the system work best it should be a FFP scope and turrets that match the reticle. If you want to have the most difficult to use system go with a mil reticle, moa turrets in a SFP system, all I can say is pass the aleeve for the headache that will follow.

As far as only being conducive to the range or heavy rifles, I will have to disagree. I run the SWFA 3x9 on all of my rifles and my Tikka runs under 8lbs loaded and ready to go. My only complaint about mil and generally FFP scopes is they tend to be catering to the military market and focus on durability which adds to more weight than sporter scopes.

Also for field practicality I have not been super successful on using a mil to get proper ranges. On a square range I have been able to work off of a known size gong and gotten hits but a real life example was my mule deer this year. I lost my LRF in the morning and kept hunting. I finally find a volunteer for the freezer and use my scope to determine his range as about 320-340 yards (yes I use yards and not meters with a mil and have survived). The shot strikes lower than intended and barely catches the bottom of the heart, I could not call my impact but could see blood squirting out both sides as he turned and jogged straight away for about 400 yards before dropping. I went out next week and confirmed the range was much closer to 390 yards and my error was in using the average body size of a deer, not the reduced freezer size on the buck I had in the reticle.

Either way I strongly encourage you to find someone to get to a range or in the field with and use a mil scope. I looked at it on paper for years and dismissed it as to complicated, a complication that totally disappeared when I could actually sit down and use it.

I am not so sure that I can agree with that even though I do not possess the skills myself. I have seen some guys that were pretty damn amazing at it.

On deer/elk/lopes?

You're a trained sniper? I thought snipers were trained to use mil reticles to range live targets. I could be wrong.






Here's how it's done with the 4 legged version...







I believe the standard is 18" for deer and 24" for elk brisket to backbone...

Its fairly accurate for me to 500 yards or so..And if conditions are bad enough that I cant use an LRF, 500 is probly plenty..

Using a reticle for long distance ranging is something wannabe snipers do to pretend they are real snipers.

everytime I practice it i have to reference a chart of some sort..then I forget it all a few hours later..LRF's are a wonderful thing.

This is where the difference between theory and reality collide. Anyone that has tried to mil range animals would know how abysmal the results are.



So standard on a deer is 18" back to brisket right? What happens when the deer really is 17in or 16in or 19 inches? What happens when the deer is 16.5 inches from back to brisket and what you thought was .8 mil is really .88?

Interestingly went to NE a couple years ago and I killed a Mule deer and a WT, and my buddy's wife killed a WT. All bucks and all from the same NF. The Muley I shot was right at 18.5in back to brisket, the Whitetail she shot was under 17in, and the WT I shot was almost 20 inches. If you believe that you can mil range live targets and get acceptable results.....

I agree. If the conditions are too schitty for a good LRF, they are probably too schitty to shoot out very far.

The other thing is, up close a guy can be off by a decent amount on his estimate and still hit vitals.

At closer range, one should have a pretty good idea as to how far a big game animal is without needing any form of device to get the range. If a deer pops out at 320 yards, and you estimate and hold for 275, you'll still kill him with about any decently flat shooting round. Just takes some practice by estimating yardages then using the LRF to test your guess. Do this enough and a guy can get pretty good out to surprisingly far. LRFs sure are nice....much better than pacing off your guesses

Yep, we were all deluded in the 80's, all those gongs that rung were figments of our imaginations. Carlos Hathcock is some sort of imaginary mind-warp [bleep] too!

Times change..I'm sure long trang would be thrilled with LRF's and a scope that wasnt 4 foot long.

That's nice.

I remember when our outfit first got ahold of some Vectors. It was like a whole new [bleep] ball game.

Once again milling a known size piece of steel is so different than milling a living, varrying sized target that they shouldn't even be spoken in the same breadth.


Milling was used back in the day (and still taught, although given way less importance than it was) because there was no other way. Homies didn't have PLRF 15's.


I'm a freaking baller at milling pieces of steel on a range. Milling animals or people and than checking with a LRF always makes me chuckle.

Back when I was guiding pronghorn and mule deer hunters in the 1980's, I learned to use my scope reticle to range both animals, which worked pretty well out to 500 yards on mature bucks--though it didn't work very well beyond that, because even the best bullets dropped too quickly.

Kept using the method for a while even after the first civilian LRF's became available, because most of them became just as unreliable beyond 500, and often even closer. But once accurate LRF's appeared I quite ranging with the reticle, because there was no comparison.

I don't guide much anymore, but do occasionally, and one of the great advantages of an LRF in guiding is that people will believe a digital readout far more readily than how much a reticle subtends on a pronghorn at X range.

Maybe you just suck at it:)

Do not get me wrong I am a LRF fan hell I own a swaro, a Leica 1600, Leica LRF binos, and a vectronix plrf15. I cannot accomplish it, but have seen two of my buddies range deer with a mils with some amazing accuracy confirmed by LRF. I can range do okay measuring known sized targets using mils, but not well enough for me to shoot at an animal. But I am wise enough to know just because I cannot do it, does not mean that no one else can.

"Now I'd guess the military community still strives to achieve the "one shot, one kill" ideal, but the mission taught at Gunsite is actually "one hit, two shots, quickly". They didn't come right out and say it, but that's what's taught. And the instructors at Gunsite are very, very, very clear these long range methods are not appropriate for hunting big game. To paraphrase the instructor's orientation lecture, "All these long range hunting TV shows are lying to you." The wording may not be exactly right, but the message was clear to everyone in the class."

crap , guess I need put all those animals back , Ill call Shawn Carlock and everyone else I know to put theirs back too.Damn you internet!

I have optics by both Swaro and Zeiss. Took me a long while to save on a Blue Collar budget to purchase them. None have mil reticles. I won't schitt can my whole optic arsenal to buy again, but with mils. I guess I will STFU and stay on the porch.

Thanks

Another fly in the ointment besides the variance in size of animals being ranged the possibility (probability) that some popular scope manufacturer's stated reticle subtensions are incorrect.