Am I looking at this correctly? The difference between your 5th shot and 40th shot.
ES = 4fps
Horizontal MPOI = .01"
Vertical MPOI = .05"
They are running numbers. The SD graph shows the SD at 2 shots, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, .... 45, 46, etc... Basically if I took the SD of the total number of shots to that point.
The other graphs show a running average of point of impact, horizontal and vertical.
At 5 shots, had you stopped there, your chrono would tell you that you had a 6fps SD, and your 'zero' would be .1" left and .025" or so high from the long term actual zero.
At 10 shots, had you stopped there, your chrono would tell you that you had 10fps SD, good horizontal, and .125" vertical shift from long term actual.
This is one set of data. I was briefly going through it earlier and there was one that moved over 0.3" from 5 shots in. Some settle down in 5 shots. Some are stable across the board, some settle down at 30 shots. The point is that you
DONT KNOW IF WHAT YOU HAVE IS STABLE IF ITS NOT A STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT SAMPLE SIZE.
They almost all do this one one form or another:
What I'm getting at is that you need to shoot 20 shots minimum (like rock fucking bottom minimum) to have a good chance of being past the noisey data and into the stable data. It still wanders around a little bit, but the changes are much more gradual and much smaller at that point. Like .05" shift or less instead of .1-.3".
Again,
Here's another way to look at it. If I take a large sample size (100+ rounds) and I shoot them in a shit load of 5 shot groups, then repeat the exact same test with a bunch of 10 shot groups, then a bunch of 15-shot groups, then a few 20 shot groups, then a couple 30 shot groups, and compare it to the average of a couple 50-shot groups, this is what it would look like:
So you tell me when you shot a single, or 2, or 3, or 4, 5-shot groups... which one(s) of the red dots you were given by the gods of randomness.
ETA: Now, if you shoot 6-10 5-shot groups, and record a common reference (same POA, for example, and overlay all of the individual groups into 1 composite), you'll find that the total average of those compiled 5-shot averages will (nearly) equal the same thing as the 50 shot average. That is fine, you have real data. But a few 5-shotters here and there, and "hmm must've pulled that one" data discards, with no common reference, means almost nothing from a real statistical analysis point of view.
Which is fine. You can do that, and you can be happy without a statistical analysis point of view. Whatever makes a dude happy. .5 MOA rifles sound great, and if you believe in it, great! .5 MOA rifles exist, and are "proven" to exist by all of the independent sub-.5 MOA 3 and 5 shot groups people post on the internet. You don't have to understand that in terms of total dispersion no such thing exists and you're gambling on every shot past ~600-700yd (target size dependent) to have fun.
