First I'd have to agree no calculator is going to "give" a first round hit at those distance as routine.. Sure, we've all seen them, had them.. but ELR is a game of misses and corrections. But some squared away shooters should be getting to within a few 1/10 of their CEP elevation at least at that 2K range. BTW, thats the real crux, other than knowing the distances and (learning) the current wind.
Just a question, have you ever ran FFS with the supported finders, set up properly?
Not busting chops in anyway. I am just getting the feeling not all of us have used all of these ballistic programs tuned and in a near, to ELR setting.
To illustrate the point. (hope I can..)
Lets say, I am a fairly shaky shooter and do not understand wind. We really need to at least take wind off the drop discussion to get a point that we all can agree on.. Rough estimated drop.
Let's assume that I have a bunch of hours using mil grade RFs and figured out just how tricky it is to range plates (It is way, way harder that many people know to get the correct return).
Let's also say I do not have an app of any kind with me, but I have a V21, a partner with a backup up, could be a PLR 15C.. or even a 25C on occasion.
12" plates confirmed @ 400m, 900m and 2000m (honestly, I tend to use ISPs and my largest, is a 24", generally used past 1500.) but, let's use 12" for the illustration.
Scopes been tested and verified correct, that is huge of course.
Drop offset at 400m confirms chrono data to the nearest small part of an inch, 900m offset confirms BC the same.
Now again remembering I am a shaky shooter, (ha, as I type got myself into trap- I would have to really squared away to get the needed drop and BC stuff done, but bare with me).
So just like the pre-app days, damn, I've been doing this to long, I go to my log book, look at the closest conditions and distance I have to the 2k mark.. guess a lot and send rounds down range.. I walking my way in.
Ok.. I am not hitting..but all around the plate.. maybe I have a 1mil CEP and dancing all around the target. (honestly thats really bad once walked in)
I write that number in my book.. 22.4 mils is the dead center of my CEP.
Now, if my friend walked over and took my data, scope, env. conditions, AOF, DOF, LAT verified 400m drop confirmed velocity, 900m confirmed BC, dead nuts range and gets something like 22.5m that would be impressive.. but I still did not get a hit on the tiny 12' target with my huge CEP..
Now, if another app doing the same as I did with FFS, says 21.7 the the center of my CEP, it is not so impressive. A good shooter would be really, really low most of the time.
Here is I think you could agree, it can mislead people if the sample 1 mil group with a near perfectly centered of actual and predicted drop, is moved lower with the 21.7 mil inaccurate prediction. Say some of the high misses would end up in a strike. If we use only the results, but not the factors that are included in them, it might appear the wrong calculation worked better, from incomplete statics.. some people would say it did. Now toss my crappy 1mil ass of my gun and put someone better shooting .2 mil groups and it obvious what calculations would be better.
I think some of the cross communicate come from several factors. In my case certainly the basic ability to communicate, but many people will not see the above behavior if they only shoot and tune at ELR ranges. So a curve in a program might be great at almost at distances out to 1500 with one gun , then they use a special purpose ELR gun with profile adjust velocity or BC and also get great results at 1200 to 2K. By all accounts it works great. Again, why I proposed removing the calculators from this topic. However in truth, if you tried to curve fit the same program ELR system to strike dead center all along the bullet flight your'l find that one or the other of the curve become compromised fairly severely. Lastly, more and more I suspect fewer of us have shot all the programs extensively and side by side and in setting with mil grade finders running dope across the board. There would be less argument if we did.
I hope that makes sense.
PS-
For new ELR shooters sake and those that use AB as their only solver, I really hope the newest batch of CDMs don't suffer from their acoustic derived data of the CDMs I used.
Lastly, having used all the toys and being against phone based solvers, I have to say I really like the range cards in GeoBaslics phone app and how you can print them out for stuff in the PRS distance range.. ya it doesn't work correctly either at the range discussed nor do most app based type solvers. But again there is a work around just as there is for AB.. create 2 separate profiles 😉 But if it sold to do something... argued that it does or does not, told others they are wrong about their performance... wait.. wait.. not I was talking about him, hell, I like Lance Armstrong