What Distance Qualifies as "Long Range"?

[Crash]

I've read lots of articles about shooting at distances of 1000 yards and more, mostly by snipers, and many factors have to be taken into consideration when taking such shots, i.e., curvature of the earth, humidity, etc., etc. My question is, at what distance are those factors not too important when shooting with your typical deer rifle such as a .308, 30-06, .270, etc. My guess is that up to about 300 yards, bullet drop and cross winds would be the only factors to be concerned about. I've never shot a deer at more than 120 yards and I've never shot at a target at over 400 yards and that was only once.

What say ye?

Crash

[LSUTiger]

The answer is caliber dependant but probably when you need a calculator to start figuring out corrections it's long range. For most hunting rounds the maximum point blank range (MPBR) is about 250-300 yds. So what zero do need to keep a +/- 3 inches MPBR out to the maximum distance with out requiring you do any calculations or scope adjustments?

http://www.chuckhawks.com/rifle_trajectory_table.htm

https://www.americanhunter.org/articles ... ting-zero/

http://dailycaller.com/2015/07/28/how-t ... ing-rifle/

[Beiruty]

The answer is caliber dependant but probably when you need a calculator to start figuring out corrections it's long range. For most hunting rounds the maximum point blank range (MPBR) is about 250-300 yds. So what zero do need to keep a +/- 3 inches MPBR out to the maximum distance with out requiring you do any calculations or scope adjustments?

http://www.chuckhawks.com/rifle_trajectory_table.htm

https://www.americanhunter.org/articles ... ting-zero/

http://dailycaller.com/2015/07/28/how-t ... ing-rifle/

[Beiruty]

In Matches, it might be classified as short, medium and long range shooting

I would like to get into this
http://demigodllc.com/articles/introduc ... mpetition/

[crazy2medic]

I use to hunt west Texas and consistantly took deer at 300 to 350 yds, the elk i shot in Colorado was 450 yds, my deer rifle is a sporterized 1917 enfield eddystone 30.06, i have gone prairie dog shooting in the panhandle and consistantly hit prairie dogs out to 400 yds with my custom .204, i think practice and knowing your rifle and the ballistics of the cartridge goes along way to being accurate at extended ranges!

[Noggin]

Back in my Army days, the standard annual shooting test for all soldiers (including those in logistics and support services) was shooting with 7.62mm L1A1 at 100m, 200m and 300m with approximately equal number of shots fired at each distance. The Army shooting manual defined 300m as the standard "battle" range, soldiers were trained to always shoot with their sights set at 300 regardless of the actual distance to the target. Therefore I would not call 300 "Long Range" but rather at the upper end of normal combat shooting with a rifle. Generally speaking long rang shooting is anything over 500m. When I did my Army Target Rifle Course in 1981 we were shooting with 7.62mm Enfields at 600yds, 900yds & 1000yds (all with iron sights) I was OK at 600 but useless at the longer ranges. At 1000yds I only manged to put one round out of 50 into a 24" bull. At those distances it is all about reading the wind, not just what the wind is doing where you are but what the wind is doing down at the target and all the way in between.

[Bitter Clinger]

For precision rifle, "long range" (shooting) is best defined as the distance at which the round becomes transonic (and therefore its behavior is far less predictable). When a bullet flies through the transonic region, the aerodynamics change. Transonic regionshockwaves shift from the tip of the bullet backward to the tail as the bullet approaches and then crosses the sound barrier at Mach 1.

http://www.texaschlforum.com/viewtopic. ... c#p1113670

[The Annoyed Man]

For precision rifle, "long range" (shooting) is best defined as the distance at which the round becomes transonic (and therefore its behavior is far less predictable). When a bullet flies through the transonic region, the aerodynamics change. Transonic regionshockwaves shift from the tip of the bullet backward to the tail as the bullet approaches and then crosses the sound barrier at Mach 1.

http://www.texaschlforum.com/viewtopic. ... c#p1113670

What Bitter Clinger said.

However, some of that is just "combat effectiveness" too.....meaning, the question becomes, what are you trying to accomplish? Punch a hole in paper.......or kill a man? One of my friends who shoots regularly out at ETTS is a medically retired MARSOC scout sniper. lately, he has been regularly ringing steel at the 1000 yard line with an AR15 based DMR, using a midrange powered scope, and shooting Hornady Superformance 75 grain match. But he's doing that just for the grins. In other words, he's just plinking......way more accurately than most of us can, but still just plinking for the grins. When it came to actually killing people at 800-1000 yards in real world combat (both Iraq and Afghanistan), he used at minimum a .308 chambered rifle - typically a bolt gun. At distances below say 600 yards, he used an accurized 5.56 weapon.

Another retired MARSOC sniper who taught me, told me that he had kills in Afghanistan at 1300 yards with a .308 when I had expressed doubt about my own .308 being a "killing rifle" beyond 1000 yards. He helped me get out to 800 yards, which I found quite difficult mainly due to deteriorating eyesight, despite have a scope that was more than capable at that distance, and a rifle to match. Maybe some day I'll get out to 1000 yards, but I can tell you that 800 yards, even with good eyesight, is no longer just "plinking". It requires an investment in VERY good optics and a rifle capable of accuracy to match, and the time invested in learning/maintaining long range skills - combined with the right load for that rifle. For example, my Remington 700 .308 shoots VERY well with my own 175 grain Matchking handload, and the 175 grain Match loads from Black Hills and Federal. Other 175 grain loads have been OK, but not nearly as good. Of all of them, my best results have been with my handload. My point is, if for example you have a .308 with a heavy 1:10 twist barrel, don't expect that just any 175 grain match load is going to perform well for you. And to add complexity, just because a load gives you little tiny .5 MOA groups at 100 yards, doesn't mean that it will hold to .5 MOA at 500 or 1000 yards. That's just ONE reason why, the further out you go, the harder it gets........but also the more interesting and arcane it gets. It's been the better part of a year since I last shot at that distance, and it is a perishable skill if not maintained, so I'm probably going to have to build up to it again when I next have the opportunity to do it.

On that same ETTS range - which goes out to 1200 yards - I have seen guys ringing steel with 6.5 Creedmore and other "less than 7.62mm" calibers at the 1200 yard line. The 6.5 Creedmores are still effective at that range, given a rifle accurate enough to hit.

Without having much experience with it, I would relegate .30-06 to roughly the same category as .308. It's not that much more powerful. The next logical step in .30 caliber cartridges for long range shooting after .308 is the .300 Win Mag, which is exactly why military sniping units chose that cartridge for long-action bolt guns rather than the .30-06 when it came time to step up from .308 to something more powerful for shooting over longer distances. If I were on the market today, and I could only afford to own ONE long range rifle, I would start with either a .308 or a 6.5 Creedmore. Either will get you well out past any distance you have any business shooting an animal at......let alone another human being unless you're being paid to do it, in which case your professionalism will afford you more rifles.

But I would encourage anyone to at least give long range shooting a try. You may not like it, and that's OK. But it is a MUCH bigger thrill to connect with a small, hard to even see, target at 800 yards, than it is to tiny groups into paper at 100 yards. Punching paper is fun. Hitting a clay pigeon on the berm at 800 yards was a huge thrill.......at least for me.....and I badly want to do it again.

[The Annoyed Man]

The answer is caliber dependant but probably when you need a calculator to start figuring out corrections it's long range. For most hunting rounds the maximum point blank range (MPBR) is about 250-300 yds. So what zero do need to keep a +/- 3 inches MPBR out to the maximum distance with out requiring you do any calculations or scope adjustments?

http://www.chuckhawks.com/rifle_trajectory_table.htm

https://www.americanhunter.org/articles ... ting-zero/

http://dailycaller.com/2015/07/28/how-t ... ing-rifle/

Go to http://www.jbmballistics.com/cgi-bin/jbmtraj-5.1.cgi, plug in the data for your caliber or bullet choice (there are also some commercial cartridges in the database), and near the bottom of the page, first input the "Vital Zone Radius" value you desire, and the a little bit below that, check the "Zero at Max Point Blank Range". The calculator will give you the maximum range you can shoot at in which the trajectory will never rise above or below the maximum vital zone radius for your target. For instance, if you want to ensure a hit inside a 10" circle, set the vital zone radius to 5", and your bullet will never rise above 5" or fall below 5" all the way out to whatever the maximum point blank range is.

I set the bullet choice to Hornady .308 Cal, 160 grain, FTX® (30-30 Winchester). I set bullet velocity to 2360, which is my actual chronographed value in my 18" barreled Marlin 336BL. Distance to Chronograph was set to the minimum possible - 1 ft - because I use a bayonet type of chronograph. I set the Sight height to 1.75" to account for my scope on that rifle. I set zero height to 0. (Plug in a value here if you are looking for a POI to be a specific height above POA at a specified zero distance.....which would not apply when figuring Max Point Blank Range.) Input your local weather data. Input maximum vital zone radius. Check Zero at Max Point Blank Range. Submit.

For that rifle, and that load, with a 10" vital zone, here's what I get (I asked for 5 yard increments):


In other words, I can hold on the POA out to 275 yards, and the POI will never be more than 5" high or 4.6" low - or, well within a 10" circle. Also note that the terminal bullet velocity and energy at Max PBR are well within the performance envelope for a clean kill with the FTX bullet

I have more than one fairly sophisticated ballistics app on my phone, but when I'm on the web, like this, I always use the jbmballistics.com online calculator. It's really easy to use, and very flexible.

[The Annoyed Man]

Similarly to my previous post, when I plug in the values for my favorite handload in .308, fired from my 26" barreled Remington 700, here's what I get:

Here's the Chronograph data:


BTW, and SD of 9.9 is a pretty consistent load.

Sierra Bullets assigns a Ballistic Coefficient of .496 from 2800 fps down to 1800 fps, and .485 below that.

So if I plug this data into the jbmballistics webpage, here's the results. I can't fit the entire thing into one screen shot, but this part shows the transitional nature into subsonic (below 1116 fps in these atmospheric conditions):


So, at 1,000 yards, the bullet is still traveling 1243.6 fps, with 600.9 ft-lbs of energy, and it has dropped 356.1" or 34 MOA. As you can see, the bullet crosses into the subsonic right between 1155 and 1160 yards (near bottom of chart), at which point it is moving between 1118.5 and 1115.1 fps, and packing between 486.1 and 483.1 ft-lbs of energy. Also, at 1155 yards, the bullet drops 548.8", or 45.4 MOA. Consider that out there, from just the 155 yards between 1000 and 1155 yards, the bullet has lost 125.1 fps of velocity, 114.8 ft-lbs of energy, and has dropped 192.7" (16.06'), or 11.4 MOA.

Meanwhile, back at the 800 yard line, where I do have some experience, the bullet was still traveling 1460 fps with 828 ft-lbs of energy, and had dropped 185.5" or 22.1 MOA.

Consider just the bullet drop over the 155 yard distance from 1000 to 1155 yards...... it drops over 16 ft in just 155 yards! Can you imagine what the trajectory looks like when viewed from the side? It's not even close to a symmetrical arc. The further the bullet travels, the slower it goes, so the decent angle from apogee gets steeper and steeper. From 1155 yards to 1300 yards, the bullet drops 240.6" more, or another 20 ft!!!! At that point, it must be falling at such a steep angle that if the target were a human face, the bullet would strike him almost vertically in the top of his head. At that point, the bullet is well under subsonic and beginning to yaw. At the moment of impact, the odds are that it might be keyholing instead of hitting nose-first.

I know this is a long post (who would have guessed that one of mine would be long ), but I find the topic of ballistics endlessly fascinating. Given the right .308 rifle and load, the average shooter (like me) can pretty much count on getting out to 1000 yards with enough practice. What happens beyond that starts to enter the realm of people who have an almost autistic talent for the thing.

From the 800 yard line to the 1300 yard line, my bullet loses 425 fps, 412 ft-lbs of energy, and drops another 604". So, can I theoretically hit a target with this load in this rifle at 1000 yards? Yes. Is this the right rifle/cartridge combo to try and hit a man with at 1300 yards (like my instructor's combat experience)? Probably not.......at least not in my hands.

And that's the humbling thing about long range shooting....... it involves getting to the point where you can admit without shame where your personal limits are. Not everybody has what it takes, including people who are really good inside of 800 yards, and those who can hit beyond 1000 yards are pretty unique shooters. I am in awe of some of the shooters I've seen. I wish I was one of them, but I'm not, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.

[threoh8]

As a point of reference, NRA rifle targets are designated for the range used. In High Power Rifle, 600 yard targets are MR - Mid-range. 800-1000 yard targets are LR - Long range.

http://www.pistoleer.com/shooting-targets/highpower/

As far as what factors are important, that depends on, as others have said, what you're doing. Benchresters get really serious about very small effects, even at 100 yards.

What's long range for me and my rifle may not be for you and yours.

[Beiruty]

I call it off after the bullet drops below 1.2Mach. Why? Cause the Ballistic Cal solution starts diverging from reality, unless you have a radar-based bullet profile. Example, using the free online 4D Ballistic Cal from Hornady with radar based Cd curve up to 2,000 yards

[Beiruty]

Hornady Solution for same bullet at 2713 fps with standard atmo

[The Annoyed Man]

Hornady Solution for same bullet at 2713 fps with standard atmo

Your Gyro value is off. The barrel twist is 1:10, not 1:7. You might get a different value if you plug in the right twist rate.