Steve is in the midst of getting cameras. He was actually going to use mine for the finals but I had some technical issues at Ringneck that I needed to deal with. The correction on points has a pretty minor effect in the end since the range you have hit to consecutively matters far more. You can look at the distribution and see that SPR scores range across the brackets from top to bottom even after the 1/3 reduction. It really is just a correction to even things out. I don't know of another match that has static targets that can be practiced on as well as competed on. It is its own thing and that is fine but the scores need to be leveled somehow to be fair.
I’m not worried. Hopefully, next year will return to normal and I will only be able to shoot a match or 2
Alex - is there a link to the current shooters list? If so, please share. Thanks
Crazy to see how low Ryan’s score was even though he has the farthest impact in a match. Just interesting to see.
Ended up having to disregard the scores from target 1 and 5 because of lack of camera coverage so the scores ended up lower than usual.
We said we would require cameras or a forward observer in order to accept scores starting this year and this is that policy being enforced. We don't trust hit indicators as a scoring tool and have never been subtle about that position. There is no reason to toss out the entire match because a few targets were not compliant though.
I'm not sure what is so hard to understand about this. If a target doesn't have a camera on it and doesn't have a forward observer scoring it, we won't accept the scores from that target.
It’s not that complicated. You’re scoring requires not missing a target. If you’re not counting a score on a target, why are you counting it as a target that’s hit?
There was a skip that hit the 2 mile target last month. They counted it as a possible hit and let the shooter shoot at the 4153 target. They later found that it was a skipped bullet and didn’t count.
Cameras don't result in perfect scoring in of themselves. Whoever is watching them can still mess up and it is pretty hard to concentrate on it after a few hours. The difference is that you can go back and review the footage to verify a call or to resolve a protest with cameras. It is a hell of a lot more reliable than say, having a shooter self report hits/misses from flashers...
We are disregarding the target entirely. Essentially treating it like it was never shot at all. Several matches I've helped with have had a target fail for one reason or another and if it isn't practical to fix it, a fairly common approach is to simply drop it from the match and keep going. I'm doing much the same thing.
I agree, the two mile target calls were handled badly and there were pictures of people pointing to impacts that looked rather improbable for the calibers they were shooting. I held off updating the results mostly because of the two mile target's issues. I've included them for now on good faith and because most of the people I've spoken with agree on the calls being mostly correct. I've asked Steve for the footage but I'm not sure he knows how to export the footage from the DVRs. I'll probably swing by the ranch at some point when I'm out there next week and try to get it sorted and help configure their system for a bit more resilience.
Yeah, I heard it went well. Cameras take some getting used to just like any new system. They had audio last time but I understand that they had turned it off cause they didn't want to listen to the wind (which is annoying) and eliminated some pretty good feedback. On really shot up targets, the clang and looking for the splatter line across the ground is usually far more reliable than trying to see a new impact but that puff alone can be subtle sometimes. Target hits also sound obviously different than leg hits and ricochets.
If they can’t prove who was the other solid impact, I’m going to go out on a limb and say, no. The only impact that they called when it happened out loud was Randy O
They actually had a bunch of people shoot the 4153 target, just in case they impacted because they weren’t sure about the 2 mile target.
Alex - thanks for the referral to your site. I'm wondering about the "300 yard brackets" to then set overall placement. I find no "logic" in your write up to help folks understand why overall position is set using such apparently arbitrary "brackets". Why not straight score? Distance is interesting but shooters don't win on distance alone. Please share the logic. Thanks.
I'm surprised given the nature of your competitions that you don't see the value in the brackets but I'm happy to explain it. Score alone resulted in some distributions that were obviously wrong. There were matches like Arena that had piles of close range targets and resulted in high scores while never getting much past 2400 yards. Since the point of the ranking is to be predictive of who will do well in Ko2M I did regression and the lack of fit was pretty bad. When I moved on to the bracketed model the lack of fit improved considerably.
Alex:
I'll keep it short but I'm sure others wonder as well. I have tried normalizing the scores but the result is garbage. Every match location is different and has its own challenges. Add to that the different skill levels of shooters in different regions of the country and the matches are incomparable.
The matches not being the same, like distances and target sizes really makes comparing scores virtually impossible. I know shooters way behind me that are better shooters. Also, old scores from 2+ years ago don’t show a shooters current skill level, both good and bad.
So that really shouldn't matter. The cameras may hitch is there is an interference issue or something like that (had a bird land on and antenna once and screw up the link for a bit. I only figure it out when I saw the crap on the antenna...) but they buffer it out with recordings stored on the camera so once they link up the recording is rectified. Even if the cameras being used can't do that, you can compare the video before and after to check for new impacts. Bullet hits a camera and all bets are off but It probably can't hit the camera and the target at least...
