MachIVshooter
Member
You certainly can, but radians work the same way, only the increments of milrads are considerably larger than an arcminute (there are 21,600 arcminutes or 6,282 milrads in a circle). Also, the sexagesmal units work hand-in-hand with the imperial measurement system we use here, as an arcminute so closely approximates one inch per hundred yards. It just makes the math easy.
Neither system is complex, though.
There are 360 degrees in a circle, 60 minutes in a degree (and 60 seconds in an arcminute). 1 arcminute = 1.047" @ 100 yards.
The radian is a segment of the circumference equal to the radius of the circle. There are 2 pi radians in a circle, times 1,000 gives you milrads (milliradians). Advantage to milrads is that they are 1 meter at a distance of 1,000 meters. Makes it easy to determine range if looking through a mil-dot scope at a target of known size; an average sized man is 1.8 meters tall, so if he appears as covering two mil dots, he is at about 900 meters range, 4 mil dots is ~ 450 meters, and so on.
Whichever one you use, you still have to understand that it is an angular measurement, and applies equally to micro and macro scales of distance. An arcminute or milrad remains the same division of a circle infinitely.
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