Essentials of Long Range Shooting Edition 1--DATA at your Fingertips. Making the most of your Kestrel Ballistics Solver
Long range shooting hasn't really changed that much since its inception. The basics are still the same; ie. position, trigger, etc.. What has changed is the way we solve gathering data. The old term DOPE, or Data On Previous Engagement is no more useful than a BDC reticle for a 7MM on a .308. Both methods are a lot of work to get the same results that can be quickly gathered with tools like the Magnetospeed chronographs and a Kestrel Applied Ballistics unit.
1200 Yards. 2 Shots touching. 18-23 mile per hours winds. Tripod shooting.
Once you've zeroed, have taken a velocity reading, and fed the data into your Kestrel via your smart phone, you are pretty much ready to shoot about any reasonable distance. But, you say you want to shoot ultra long range? The Kestrel has got you covered there too.
Follow the Kestrel's built in drop compensation distance, fire a couple of shots and make the elevation driven corrections to your bullet's ballistic coefficient. The Kestrel does the rest by altering the algorithm in a way that corrects the trajectory.
This method can also be used to make certain you have an accurate muzzle velocity if you can't afford a Magnetospeed. The Kestrel 5700 Elite has you covered. Find a target at the distance suggested by the Kestrel for you particular load, fire confirmation shots, assess necessary velocity corrections so that solution reflects real life results, and shazam --you have your corrected muzzle velocity.
It's long range made easy.
The BIG WHY I do this.
I assume we all know how fragile electronics can be, even those magical 'smart' phones. Assume we have something like a coronal mass ejection or a high altitude electro-magnetic pulse, or God forbid a nuclear exchange. Those precision electronics are gone, fried. Toast. They have Bluetooth antennas after all. These antennas are super sensitive gatherers of both signal and emp type charges. If you do not have some kind of paper based DOPE/DATA/BALLISTIC chart you will literally be starting from scratch.
While we're discussing this let's consider how many solvers, scopes, and laser range finders have the BlueTooth connectivity feature built in. Many do and its great in its way and horrible in other ways. I know we can get things like faraday bags for gear storage and we should absolutely do so, but, unless you have a friend in the Kremlin and/or Beijing, or a direct connection to God you aren't going to know when to protect your gear.
Personally, this gear is always stored in a faraday bag if I'm not using it. Hopefully, none of these scenarios come to pass but we are at the most dangerous point in human history...so there's that.
I'd encourage each of you to follow in my preventative footprints and create tables in RiteintheRain Notebooks. It takes 20 minutes to write down each caliber from your Kestrel's ballistic table.
One last thing that will really make this valuable will be if you set your wind to ten miles per hour from 3 o'clock (right) and then from 9 o'clock (left). This added data will allow you to see the effects of aerodynamic jump. After all, wind doesn't just make the bullet slide left or right. It also makes it move up and down as it cancels out gyroscopic drift or exacerbates it.
That's all for now folks.
See our up coming articles on:
Amend 2's new products
Leupold Mark 5 5-25 Scopes
The soon to be Triggertech Trigger for the Ruger Precision Rifle
How the Conservative head in the sand mentality is getting us in trouble
Thoughts on Ruger and Smith and Wesson's very public pressures