I am certainly not going to have people in the pits with magnifying glasses and calipers pulling the targets down measuring the exact coordinates of every shot.
That's the crux of the issue here I believe:
With paper targets there's an
artifact left behind - the holes - once a bullet has passed thru the paper.
You can see it, measure its distance from a scoring ring or another hole, cut it out and take it home to mount on your wall if you want to, along with the others than have been created over time as you've fired round after round, trying to stay centered up and adjusting for wind conditions all the while.
With ET's all you have are pixels forming an image on a screen, or maybe toner particles fused to a piece of paper (NOT what you were aiming at!) or a set of spreadsheet numbers that were used to calculate where those toner bits were placed by a printer or those screen pixels.
It's a LEAP OF FAITH to believe those numbers represent the same thing as those holes in the paper target you were aiming at, because in truth they don't.
They CAN'T.
They're
not the same thing whatsoever.
Whether a paper target was held rigidly in place during a string of fire isn't commonly addressed. Targets move about in the wind, just like bullets flying down range. Target backers inevitably aren't flat either, targets themselves aren't dimensionally perfect yet we have accepted the truth of the artifacts they record as some kind of absolute.
So swapping ET's for paper targets requires an entirely unfamiliar - perhaps uncomfortable - mindset for acceptance. Trust in
The System if you will. Trust that, all else concerning bullet paths aside, the results returned are as accurate a representation as possible of where in the calculated space (between whatever sensors are arrayed to record their passage) your bullets have been passing as they arrive and get noticed.
It comes down to numbers, not holes.
How those numbers are obtained. How
reliable they are. How
repeatable the system is over time to determine where those bullets are as they pass. It's not about a physical representation, an artifact, left behind in something that didn't have a hole until a bullet went thru it.
I own and use an SMT G2 system. It serves my needs for practice. I accept that what I see on screen is not the
same as the paper target I aim at, yet because I can see that my sight changes and position flaws are reflected in how those pixels array themselves once the last shot I've fired is scored, I've come to trust it in other words as being 'good enough' for this purpose. At the same time I trust what the SMT system installed at Winnequah tells me when I shoot there, either in practice or for an event.
Truth be told I have yet to shoot on any other available ET system; they're too distant from me where installed, and I can't afford to buy one of each either for use closer to home. Besides I know they all have their own drawbacks.
What I'd like to see here is a
reasonable discussion of what other principles there are in physics that might be used to achieve as practical
and affordable ET system as what's out there now, that won't have the drawbacks associated with data acquisition captured by acoustic sensors.
From what I know at present there's nothing yet out there.
Yet I intend to keep an open mind.