Alternate sighting method.

[Tony Z]

Now that we have done the target cams, hairy legs and rimfires that shoot through the wind like a Tony Boyer hummer barrel thing to death, i thought i would throw this one in from way out of left field.
One of the things that made it real easy for me to walk away and sell up my Heavy Guns is the incessant mirage we have to deal with up here in North Queensland. I don't care who you are or what scope you own, the mirage will get you eventually. So for a long time i have thought of a way to get around mirage, but until recently i looked outside of the square.
Now what i am about to put forward is more to do with the HGs as there is at this time a rather large problem with getting around the disruption issue with a LG. When i think back to the days of when i was a military sniper up this way and then later at Duntroon with all the spoon feds, i played around with a lot of artillery, mortar and MG sights. I mean the fixed bearing and C2 type sights. When used on any of these weapons, the bearings and elevations were recorded so you could set up and fire in the dead of night or in the brightest sunlight. Most of you are probably lost by now, but it is the same simple process that artillery and such have used for over a century. How this works exactly is not important, but the principal is. These pieces are "aimed" by reference posts used in conjunction with a sight that records a bearing and elevation and are not aimed by any actual sighting process that we would normally associate with the riflescope system we have all become accustomed to
Let's go back to my sniper days again so i can outline a couple of problems we can can rid ourselves of. We did a lot of shooting in the Cessnock, Mudgee and Newcastle areas and at the time i was there at the INF Center, it was a long and very hot summer. One day the pommy SI WO1 from the UKs RM sniper school got out a scope and sand bagged it in a nice shady spot at the 1K mark of the range we were at that day. This was at about 7 am and the crosshairs were shifted to a target set aside just for the purpose and we looked through it periodically throughout the day. Needless to say that in cool still air the wires were on the mothball, but by 2 pm the mothball and wires were a long way from being aligned. The point is that this light bending does and will happen at any time and is never constant and picking out a true reference point on the target was extremely difficult.

Now let's get back to the artillery sighting principal. Say you have a HG with two scopes mounted. One is some sort of 10 or 12 power that is sighted to the 1K elevation. You fire a shot and you are on paper, no problems. The other scope is a very high resolution 12x42 Nightforce but it doesn't aim anywhere at this point. The HG is re-settled on the bags up against all the stops and with the crosshair of the 10 power on the mothball of the 1K target again, the Nightforce is then wound onto a aiming post marker (target) at say 50 yards. The dot of the Nightforce is now aligned to the aiming post marker while the 10 power is still trained on the mothball of the 1K target. From this point on you never use the 10 power to sight with again, it now becomes just a simple spotting scope to see your fall of shot during the sighter period. The Nightforce is aimed at the sight post marker just like you would if you were training it on the 1K target and the next shot is fired. Where the next shot lands can then be adjusted by using the Nightforce in the same manner as you normally would during your sighter period. You are hitting the 1K target but you are aiming at the 50 yard target that will never show any effect of boiling mirage like you would normally get when sighting at that target at 1K. The aiming is going to be extremely precise and nothing the mirage does, or however the light may be bent, if you have the dot of the Nightforce on the 50 yard marker post, the barrel will be pointing where it should be, right where the target is and not where it isn't like in the case of light bending we do get on our range.
Now for those of you that are really quick on this, it becomes obvious that this can be done with a single scope, but then it would require a record of MOA shifted to train the dot on the marker and reset back to zero for the next time you start the process again. Or you simply place the rifle in shot position again with the dot on the sight post marker and then without moving the gun, wind the scopes dot back onto the actual 1K target. But you will need a spotting scope to see fall of shot during the sighter period.

Now this all sounds time consuming but i can assure you it can be done in seconds. But there is one flaw in all this. Things that recoil move around and this whole principal relies on a base setting or axis point. Artillery do it by triangulation and these days that is done with laser. There is a very simple way i have devised that a HG could be relocated very quickly and be back at this base point if you had some mishap and shifted your rests in some major way during your sighter or record period. There is another flaw or problem in this and that has to do with the third dimensional plane to get back to base point as opposed to the two dimensional plane i have outlined in the "sight alignment process". That needs to be dealt with if it arises during actual tests, but my view is that the vertical induced by this error would be less than that of the uncertainty of aim normally associated with shooting in our crap up here. This error could be reduced by placing the marker post to say a 100 yards, but on our real tough days, even sighting on a 100 yard target can be challenging.
What it will ultimately come down to is wind reading and shot release. If you are the aim off type, the marker on the sight post could be a scaled down 1K target and you just aim off according to what your sighter memory recall was. Nothing changes except for the fact that what you are aiming at is at 50 yards and not subject to boiling mirage.
There are two very important things in this system. One is as outlined, the axis point must be maintained at all times. That is no real problem The second thing is that the marker post must be absolutely stationary at all times. This is imperative as any movement here changes the angle of bullet departure by 20 fold if you have the marker at 50 yards. Ideally the marker should be very close to the line from the barrel to the target as any angular placement to this increases the error of the angle of departure if the rifle does not exactly relocate to battery. This is minimal, but nonetheless it exists.

I can see a massive change to the way we look at mirage with this system as we now no longer have to look at mirage again and whatever it does has no effect on the aim of the shot. Sighting at 1K is very rarely perfect but at 50 yards it most always is so i can see this system once it is perfected as being a real boost at all times. But then we still have the wind!


Jethro Bodine, Loose Cannon.

[andrewk]

great read tony but hate to rain on your parade but i think this sighting method dates back alot further.

i used to be involved rather heavily in archery and i believe i still hold an australian record in the disipline i'm about to discribe.

the event, know as clout, is basically an adaptation of medi-evil archers say the english having it out with the french most likely over a selected battle ground. first of the fancy show of mel gibson dressed in a skirt spurking something about giving up women but not letting go of his freedom..... no wait wrong movie. but the archers, at the start of the battle, let fly volleys of arrows which i might add usually decided the out come.

the technique pretty much is raise ones bow arm in the air to the optimum angle that give the arrow its greatest distance which i believe is roughly 38 degrees from horizotal and loose at your target.

ok so how did they aim it?? and we are talking a long bow here. your approaching army is your target but they are obstructed by your bow arm so looking and aiming at them is no good. well simple, the bow has a leather bound grip that provides a basic rest for the arrow and under it it would be more leather bound further down in a fancy weave but of equal incriments if you follow me. now this bound leather under your bow hand is it your nightforce scope and its adjustable as far as which node of leather to aim from. your fifty yard marker is much the same, could even have been a rock, but usually at about twenty yards.


so back to clout, the target known as the clout is simply white triangle in the middle of coresponding yellow, red, blue, black and white flags in a row extending either side.These flag represent the scoring zones 10 points to 1 and out side a miss. There is a string line connected to the clout and it meets these scoring zones. Pull it tight and walk a wide circle around the clout and you have your target, collect you arrows that land within the scoring zones and you have your score.

I need pictures here but back to the sighting method. I tried prisms and mirrors so I could sight normally, looking through the sight window of my bow, and one of these techniques scored my record but the most consistent was the good old ground marker and pin. The distance was known and a constant, 180m for my category, for the event so a piece of string from a foot marker, at which is your constant position from the firing, to your ground marker or aiming point infront of you, and line it all up with the clout and that gave you your sight setting.

Easy. Then adjust your marker or pin for fine tuning and to allow for the conditions on the day and your lobbing arrows at the clout with surprising accuracy.

Once your finish, roll up your foot marker, string and aiming marker and keep it for next time.

Same method of aiming and now I see a good dodge of mirage for long range rifle shooting.

[Curtley78]

........Say you have a HG with two scopes mounted. One is some sort of 10 or 12 power that is sighted to the 1K elevation. You fire a shot and you are on paper, no problems. The other scope is a very high resolution 12x42 Nightforce but it doesn't aim anywhere at this point. The HG is re-settled on the bags up against all the stops and with the crosshair of the 10 power on the mothball of the 1K target again, the Nightforce is then wound onto a aiming post marker (target) at say 50 yards. The dot of the Nightforce is now aligned to the aiming post marker while the 10 power is still trained on the mothball of the 1K target. From this point on you never use the 10 power to sight with again, it now becomes just a simple spotting scope to see your fall of shot during the sighter period. The Nightforce is aimed at the sight post marker just like you would if you were training it on the 1K target and the next shot is fired. Where the next shot lands can then be adjusted by using the Nightforce in the same manner as you normally would during your sighter period. You are hitting the 1K target but you are aiming at the 50 yard target that will never show any effect of boiling mirage like you would normally get when sighting at that target at 1K. The aiming is going to be extremely precise and nothing the mirage does, or however the light may be bent, if you have the dot of the Nightforce on the 50 yard marker post, the barrel will be pointing where it should be, right where the target is and not where it isn't like in the case of light bending we do get on our range.

Now for those of you that are really quick on this, it becomes obvious that this can be done with a single scope, but then it would require a record of MOA shifted to train the dot on the marker and reset back to zero for the next time you start the process again. Or you simply place the rifle in shot position again with the dot on the sight post marker and then without moving the gun, wind the scopes dot back onto the actual 1K target. But you will need a spotting scope to see fall of shot during the sighter period.

Jethro Bodine, Loose Cannon.

G'day Tony,

I think what your advocating is much like what is used on a high power telescope and similiar to a method that Small Bore prone shooters use as opposed to re-adjusting their position and hold (they keep the same position and hold on the same sight picture and wind up, down or over).

Regards

Sean