Shawnee
member
When I was a youth, Jackson was President (Andrew, not Janet) and hunters were pretty pragmatic about concepts like Trajectory. In the Olden Days (that's the pre-Yuppie version of "back in the day") we spoke often of "Point Blank Range", but there is some confusion about that term.
Many many people today, especially those who play shoot 'em up video games and/or watch shoot 'em up cop shows think PBR means roughly zero distance between the gun's muzzle and the bad guy's muzzle - or good guy's muzzle, for those of you reading this from sunny Joliet.
But, as we hunters spake (50 cents please) of it in The Olden Days, PBR meant: that distance to which you could fire a cartridge while holding on a bullseye and have the bullet never be more than X inches above or below the line of sight. This concept is, even today, imminently useful for hunters comparing calibers and bullets - although not nearly as expensive or chic as buying "tactical" equipment. Alas, it's just really, really useful. It also can show just how much difference there ISN'T between the glorious plethora (50 cents please) of modern rifle calibers, the Advertising Dept. notwithstanding..
To illustrate... a Whitetail deer (neither a physical over- nor under-achiever) is more or less 15" from the bottom line of the brisket to the topline of the withers.
So it stands to reason (that's the pre-Yuppie version of "DUH?!") that if one's choice of caliber/bullet will send it's lead telegram out to ... say... 2421 yards with the bullet never being more than... let's say 4" above or below the Point of Aim ... the pragmatic deer hunter can simply hold on the vertical center of a deer anywhere from 0.0 to 2421 yards - not worry about drop at all - and expect to land his shot solidly in the "kill zone". Thus our fortunate hunter's caliber/bullet combination would have been said to have a Point Blank Range of 2421 yards. If he could find a caliber/bullet combo that would stay within that 4" window for 1000 miles he could save air fare and shoot Mule Deer from Pittsburgh. But those are rare.
If the hunter is a wee dram fussy - he can always hold "slightly high". Or if the range appears to exceed 2421 yds by a goodly margin he can hold right on the topline of the aforementioned doomed deer and still be filled with Hope.
That 4" can, of course, be expanded to about 6 inches for Elk/Moose hunting but, for prairie dog sniping it must be shrunk to about 2".
This PBR concept, by the way, is the root source from whence the term "flat-shooting" caliber sprang oh so many decades ago.
Of course one hopes to have a PBR that more or less matches the typical range requirements of hunting their chosen quarry AND to have a bullet energy level at that range that is appropriate for the game being sought. It does little good to have a PBR of 2421 yards but not enough bullet energy at that range to do more than anger a Whitetail buck.
So, to make this rainy day epistle even longer and more tedious - let's exhibit PBR via a look at one of the most useful, yet most overlooked calibers in Deer-Huntingdom - the lowly .300 Savage. We'll use handloaded 130gr SP bullets at a nominal 2950fps.
This load can be "zero'd" at 250yds. and will be within the 4" window out to 300 yds. That trajectory will take 99% of the deer shot by 95% of our deer hunters.
Just for fun (and because it is still raining) let's peek at another wonderfully classic and truly useful American deer caliber/bullet combo - the 150gr Round Nose 30/30. Handloaded to a nominal 2350fps, this load can be "zero'd" at 175yds. - whereupon (50 cents please) it will be a scant 2 inches low at 200yds. and still within the 4" window at about 235yds., at which point it has retained 800+ ft./lbs of energy and that is a good place to call "minimum" for bullets of that construction on Whitetails. Again, that will quite handily harvest nearly all the deer nearly all our deer hunters will ever reap.
But WAIT !!! If you read doggedly on through the rest of this in the next 30 minutes we'll ( Ok, I'll ) provide you with even more rainy day Olden Days Rifle Trivia - AT NO EXTRA COST !.
In those moth-eaten days of which I speak, rifle scopes were things of dubious quality and very scarce distribution. Thus in many of the old books you can read hunters shining forth in heated diatribes
about how many 16ths of an inch in diameter the front bead sight should be and whether it should be made of gold or silver or ivory, or should be one of those radical new "flat-top posts", and should it be used "hooded", etc., etc. (that's the pre-Yuppie version of "yadda, yadda").
This is to say that the hunting field populated with "iron sights" was a bit of a different landscape - a fact one readily perceives when one realizes that the bead of a front sight can easily subtend (cover up) the entire "kill zone" of a deer before the range gets too, too far away - and certainly covers up more of any target than does that wee intersection of a scope's crosshairs. So this is a prelude to say there is/was another variant of Point Blank Range used by some of us antique deerslayers. Let's return to our beloved 30/30 load to illustrate that.
The classic 150gr. Round Nose 30/30 load can be sighted in to be 6.5" HIGH at 100 yds.
OMG !! 6.5" High ? At 100yds.?? Have I LOST My Mind ???
Well... Probably, but...
6.5" high at 100yds. puts the load "zero'd" at 250 yds. But more importantly, the bullet never rises more than about 8 inches anywhere from 0 yards to 250 yds.
THAT means the hunter can hold that big blocky bead at the BOTTOMLINE of his deer's vital area at any range out to the limit of his bullet's energy and easily land a killing hit on the deer. Thus, the hunter was able to "use a 6 o'clock hold" (in targeter's parlance) to keep the deer visible (as opposed to mostly obscured by the bead or post) during the shot. And THAT was/is a very good thing !
Now, since I have you on the edge of your seat, I'll back up a few furrows to enthrall Y'All with some classic trivia about the Olden Days Front Bead Sight Debate.... to wit - why is the design/material of the "bead" of the front sight important (that's the pre-Yuppie version of "Should I buy a matte 4x10x40 or a silver 3x9x42?").
The old timers hunted in woods, river bottoms and swamps a lot where there were areas of deep shade and intense sunlight sometimes only a few feet apart. Vision struggled to adjust and re-adjust and re-adjust again all day. They knew that how the bead captured and reflected the light could cause them to shoot left or right or high or low,... or some combination thereof - sometimes enough to mean a hit that wasn't so hot, or even a miss on something like a turkey's head or a squirrel.
Some of them preferred convex "faces" on their beads, some liked concave and some liked flat. Some liked gold, some silver, and some ivory - either for how the material handled the light or how MUCH light it reflected. For example...
A bright bead like Ivory - with a concave face - seen with the light coming strongly from the left side - would make the center of the bead appear to be farther left than it was for real because the right side would be heavily contrasted and appear darker... enough that the shooter would aim wrong. Ivory also yellowed - thus dimmed - with age. A problem most often associated with silver-colored sights was insufficient light reflection in woods and it was fairly quick to tarnish and wouldn't clean up much with just that handy, all-purpose elixir known the World over as "spit".
Before wrapping this newspaper up I'll add, for the sake of comparison, a PBR example for the caliber/bullet that has sent a large number of Whitetails into the shadowy depths of my Weber Smoker - the .243 Winchester using the Hornady 87gr. BTHP loaded at a nominal 3150fps.
If "zero'd at 275yds. it will be within the 4" window out to about 325yds. and that will take all the deer a person ever needs to shoot.
BUT WAIT !!!
... if a body accidentally wasted their entire scope fund on wine, wimmin and song, thus finding themselves and their .243 among the ranks of iron sights users
, they can use that same 275yd "zero" to hold at the bottomline of their deer and expect a vital hit every time out to 240-250yds, and that is about the limit for iron sights under even good hunting conditions. And that range will cover the lion's share of truly feasible shots for the lion's share of the deer dispatchers in the Republic.
And that, My Comrades in Arms, is enough knowledge to get you a Creme Soda (IF you add $1.19 in small unmarked bills).
Shawnee
Many many people today, especially those who play shoot 'em up video games and/or watch shoot 'em up cop shows think PBR means roughly zero distance between the gun's muzzle and the bad guy's muzzle - or good guy's muzzle, for those of you reading this from sunny Joliet.
But, as we hunters spake (50 cents please) of it in The Olden Days, PBR meant: that distance to which you could fire a cartridge while holding on a bullseye and have the bullet never be more than X inches above or below the line of sight. This concept is, even today, imminently useful for hunters comparing calibers and bullets - although not nearly as expensive or chic as buying "tactical" equipment. Alas, it's just really, really useful. It also can show just how much difference there ISN'T between the glorious plethora (50 cents please) of modern rifle calibers, the Advertising Dept. notwithstanding..
To illustrate... a Whitetail deer (neither a physical over- nor under-achiever) is more or less 15" from the bottom line of the brisket to the topline of the withers.
So it stands to reason (that's the pre-Yuppie version of "DUH?!") that if one's choice of caliber/bullet will send it's lead telegram out to ... say... 2421 yards with the bullet never being more than... let's say 4" above or below the Point of Aim ... the pragmatic deer hunter can simply hold on the vertical center of a deer anywhere from 0.0 to 2421 yards - not worry about drop at all - and expect to land his shot solidly in the "kill zone". Thus our fortunate hunter's caliber/bullet combination would have been said to have a Point Blank Range of 2421 yards. If he could find a caliber/bullet combo that would stay within that 4" window for 1000 miles he could save air fare and shoot Mule Deer from Pittsburgh. But those are rare.
If the hunter is a wee dram fussy - he can always hold "slightly high". Or if the range appears to exceed 2421 yds by a goodly margin he can hold right on the topline of the aforementioned doomed deer and still be filled with Hope.
That 4" can, of course, be expanded to about 6 inches for Elk/Moose hunting but, for prairie dog sniping it must be shrunk to about 2".
This PBR concept, by the way, is the root source from whence the term "flat-shooting" caliber sprang oh so many decades ago.
Of course one hopes to have a PBR that more or less matches the typical range requirements of hunting their chosen quarry AND to have a bullet energy level at that range that is appropriate for the game being sought. It does little good to have a PBR of 2421 yards but not enough bullet energy at that range to do more than anger a Whitetail buck.
So, to make this rainy day epistle even longer and more tedious - let's exhibit PBR via a look at one of the most useful, yet most overlooked calibers in Deer-Huntingdom - the lowly .300 Savage. We'll use handloaded 130gr SP bullets at a nominal 2950fps.
This load can be "zero'd" at 250yds. and will be within the 4" window out to 300 yds. That trajectory will take 99% of the deer shot by 95% of our deer hunters.
Just for fun (and because it is still raining) let's peek at another wonderfully classic and truly useful American deer caliber/bullet combo - the 150gr Round Nose 30/30. Handloaded to a nominal 2350fps, this load can be "zero'd" at 175yds. - whereupon (50 cents please) it will be a scant 2 inches low at 200yds. and still within the 4" window at about 235yds., at which point it has retained 800+ ft./lbs of energy and that is a good place to call "minimum" for bullets of that construction on Whitetails. Again, that will quite handily harvest nearly all the deer nearly all our deer hunters will ever reap.
But WAIT !!! If you read doggedly on through the rest of this in the next 30 minutes we'll ( Ok, I'll ) provide you with even more rainy day Olden Days Rifle Trivia - AT NO EXTRA COST !.
In those moth-eaten days of which I speak, rifle scopes were things of dubious quality and very scarce distribution. Thus in many of the old books you can read hunters shining forth in heated diatribes
about how many 16ths of an inch in diameter the front bead sight should be and whether it should be made of gold or silver or ivory, or should be one of those radical new "flat-top posts", and should it be used "hooded", etc., etc. (that's the pre-Yuppie version of "yadda, yadda"). This is to say that the hunting field populated with "iron sights" was a bit of a different landscape - a fact one readily perceives when one realizes that the bead of a front sight can easily subtend (cover up) the entire "kill zone" of a deer before the range gets too, too far away - and certainly covers up more of any target than does that wee intersection of a scope's crosshairs. So this is a prelude to say there is/was another variant of Point Blank Range used by some of us antique deerslayers. Let's return to our beloved 30/30 load to illustrate that.
The classic 150gr. Round Nose 30/30 load can be sighted in to be 6.5" HIGH at 100 yds.
OMG !!
6.5" High ? At 100yds.?? Have I LOST My Mind ???Well... Probably, but...
6.5" high at 100yds. puts the load "zero'd" at 250 yds. But more importantly, the bullet never rises more than about 8 inches anywhere from 0 yards to 250 yds.
THAT means the hunter can hold that big blocky bead at the BOTTOMLINE of his deer's vital area at any range out to the limit of his bullet's energy and easily land a killing hit on the deer. Thus, the hunter was able to "use a 6 o'clock hold" (in targeter's parlance) to keep the deer visible (as opposed to mostly obscured by the bead or post) during the shot. And THAT was/is a very good thing !
Now, since I have you on the edge of your seat, I'll back up a few furrows to enthrall Y'All with some classic trivia about the Olden Days Front Bead Sight Debate.... to wit - why is the design/material of the "bead" of the front sight important (that's the pre-Yuppie version of "Should I buy a matte 4x10x40 or a silver 3x9x42?").
The old timers hunted in woods, river bottoms and swamps a lot where there were areas of deep shade and intense sunlight sometimes only a few feet apart. Vision struggled to adjust and re-adjust and re-adjust again all day. They knew that how the bead captured and reflected the light could cause them to shoot left or right or high or low,... or some combination thereof - sometimes enough to mean a hit that wasn't so hot, or even a miss on something like a turkey's head or a squirrel.
Some of them preferred convex "faces" on their beads, some liked concave and some liked flat. Some liked gold, some silver, and some ivory - either for how the material handled the light or how MUCH light it reflected. For example...
A bright bead like Ivory - with a concave face - seen with the light coming strongly from the left side - would make the center of the bead appear to be farther left than it was for real because the right side would be heavily contrasted and appear darker... enough that the shooter would aim wrong. Ivory also yellowed - thus dimmed - with age. A problem most often associated with silver-colored sights was insufficient light reflection in woods and it was fairly quick to tarnish and wouldn't clean up much with just that handy, all-purpose elixir known the World over as "spit".
Before wrapping this newspaper up I'll add, for the sake of comparison, a PBR example for the caliber/bullet that has sent a large number of Whitetails into the shadowy depths of my Weber Smoker - the .243 Winchester using the Hornady 87gr. BTHP loaded at a nominal 3150fps.
If "zero'd at 275yds. it will be within the 4" window out to about 325yds. and that will take all the deer a person ever needs to shoot.
BUT WAIT !!!
... if a body accidentally wasted their entire scope fund on wine, wimmin and song, thus finding themselves and their .243 among the ranks of iron sights users, they can use that same 275yd "zero" to hold at the bottomline of their deer and expect a vital hit every time out to 240-250yds, and that is about the limit for iron sights under even good hunting conditions. And that range will cover the lion's share of truly feasible shots for the lion's share of the deer dispatchers in the Republic. And that, My Comrades in Arms, is enough knowledge to get you a Creme Soda (IF you add $1.19 in small unmarked bills).
Shawnee
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