Straight on short range (100-300 yards) Benchrest Shooting. I’ve been loading for about 16 years and in my personal shooting have never found an answer, one vs the other. I was just curious if any real studies had been completed on the topic. Or, if someone had convincing evidence of one vs the other.
Thanks for the reply!
There is a real problem with non-lab folks wanting to deride lab folks on the forum, so let's just say that real lab methods that stand up to peer reviews or court rooms, versus the internet are not the same..... that said...
Do we really need that kind of testing or method here (here meaning in a BR context)? My opinion is no.
In BR, we are discussing a specific game where groups of 5 at a time are required, and ammo can be tuned to the conditions. There are sighters, which is a very important distinction.
The sheer number of humans who randomly explore the fringes and margins of loading, combined with the ones near the middle of the trail, have beaten the topic to death. That is, the topic of getting state of the art performance results. The internal ballistics and external ballistics topics leave very little room for "discovery" unless we are talking real R&D for making better material or components.
With a barrel from a well-respected maker, chambered by a competent smith, while using high quality components in the load recipe, we already have a pretty good idea of the average results before the first shot is taken.
Who will set a +3 Sigma or set a record is not the same debate, but in the hands of the skilled competitors we can even say that those records have a trend limit that moves with the manufacturing technology and bullet makers. Records fall when conditions are right, and there have been enough tries.
But to be more clear, I am not aware of any formal studies of BR shooting unless you count the use of machines. Those were bullet tests more than they were load development testing, and the results were never public domain or shareable.
When "inside" and discussing BR shooting, we had to limit the discussion to the folks who were also "insiders" and willing to explain their testing and results since The GOV had no real interest in BR shooting.
When we looked at match results, it was easy to see that even at the bigger well attended matches, there was no guarantee of records being set or conditions being ripe for records to be set.
Shooting groups during a match was not the same as the question of how did those top performers find their loads? None that I am aware of used round robin testing for BR. They will speak up if they choose.
That makes sense since the typical guns, calibers, cartridges, bullets, recipes, barrels, etc., are all well established and wouldn't really require what I would call raw and impartial research methods. YMMV
