First, Yes this is over 1:45 long, but quite interesting if you’re into ballistics. This is part of the 7mm shootout but really doesn’t deal with any of the specific builds or comparing calibers, Etc
Cliff Notes
He uses ballistic software to calculate the dispersion of a 7 PRC shooting 160 CX at an elk sized Target. He then adjust variables to see what has the most effect at improving the size of the dispersion, and ranks them.
Note 1, this is assuming a perfect shooter. No accounting for flinches, jerks, etc. Also no accounting for increased wobble due to excitement or exhaustion.
Note 2, When he talks about a 1 MOA rifle, that’s the maximum, not the average. Going back to Litz, a 1MOA average rifle will shoot groups up to 1.6MOA. So when he talks about a 0.5 MOA rifle, that’s a gun that actually averages 0.3.
Big takeaways:
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By FAR, the most important things you can do to have the biggest effect on shrinking your dispersion size is appropriate wind reading ability and good rangefinding. If you’re off on either of these two any Improvement of anything else will basically be meaningless.
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At 600 yrds and in, improving your ES from 50 to 15 makes no effect on the group size.
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At 600 yards and in, increasing the ballistics coefficient has a very little to Zero Effect on group size.
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Increasing your rifles accuracy, as well as increasing the velocity can have improvements which sometimes are actually ranked High but only in certain circumstances.
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Shooting at smaller targets like deer sized game, you need to shoot at shorter max distances.
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Shooting past 600 yards is not advised at all because the dispersion is so bad. In order to make it even partially decent you have to be one of the world’s most perfect wind readers ever
Overall an interesting listen