You know - you guys really got me thinking here, which is great! If I look back at some of these 100 yard "0.5MOA targets" where I was shooting multiple groups of 5 shots. any individual group has an ES of .4-.6 basically so they average out to 0.5... if you were to take all the individual groups and over-lay them, so in this example 40 shots, so that the point of aim was identical on them all, there is no way they'd have an ES of 0.5 MOA. in fact, it just eyeballing it, it looks like it would be approximately (wait for it) 1MOA. Just like these larger groups of 15 I've been shooting at 200 and 300 yards!
Now its really easy to rationalize this away: Oh, because I was shooting 5 and then breaking cheek weld, etc my point of aim got tweaked slightly, yadda yadda but the reality is that I need to put 15 shots on target for the game I'm playing, not 3 groups of 5 or even 8 groups of 5
According to Litz, using 5x5 groups with ES should get you the same result at a single group of 15 using mean radius but I'm starting to wonder if thats actually true...
Now its really easy to rationalize this away: Oh, because I was shooting 5 and then breaking cheek weld, etc my point of aim got tweaked slightly, yadda yadda but the reality is that I need to put 15 shots on target for the game I'm playing, not 3 groups of 5 or even 8 groups of 5
According to Litz, using 5x5 groups with ES should get you the same result at a single group of 15 using mean radius but I'm starting to wonder if thats actually true...