It all began this morning when the forecast called for a stiff breeze out here in Colorado, and I figured it was the perfect time to practice my wind reading skills with a little shooting. I donned my trusty Applied Ballistics hat, adding a wrap or two of duct tape to keep it firmly attached, and headed out to the range.
That was when I first discovered, much to my chagrin, a major flaw in the Applied Ballistics software integrated in my Kestrel - it will not measure continuous or maximum wind speeds higher than 50mph while in ballistics mode, nor will it calculate firing solutions for wind speeds greater than 50mph.
While ordinarily this wouldn't trouble me much, the issue was that the average wind speed at times this morning was north of 60mph with peak gusts regularly reaching 80, 90, and once even 104mph. How am I expected to make do with a ballistics calculator that only accepts wind inputs half as large as the wind I'm shooting in? This is an outrage, and I'm quite disappointed!
Hopefully in a future update the Applied Ballistics team will be able to rectify this issue to allow shooting in wind speeds up to and including F1 tornados, fully accommodating any of their customers in the shooting circumstances they may encounter from day to day. I'm sure the lack of such important functionality thus far was nothing more than an accidental oversight that somehow slipped through the cracks, and I'm looking forward to my next range trip to test out the fix - as soon as I find my trusty hat, that is, which somehow still managed to escape despite my improvised adhesive stampede strings.
On another note, I believe I'll need to either switch to heavy 115gr bullets in my Dasher to cut through the wind better, or perhaps start to offset my scope by 90° on breezy days like today to ensure enough windage turret travel. Even with only half of my actual wind speed input in the device, I was running out of adjustment range before 1,000 yards with my current 105 Hybrid load.
That was when I first discovered, much to my chagrin, a major flaw in the Applied Ballistics software integrated in my Kestrel - it will not measure continuous or maximum wind speeds higher than 50mph while in ballistics mode, nor will it calculate firing solutions for wind speeds greater than 50mph.
While ordinarily this wouldn't trouble me much, the issue was that the average wind speed at times this morning was north of 60mph with peak gusts regularly reaching 80, 90, and once even 104mph. How am I expected to make do with a ballistics calculator that only accepts wind inputs half as large as the wind I'm shooting in? This is an outrage, and I'm quite disappointed!
Hopefully in a future update the Applied Ballistics team will be able to rectify this issue to allow shooting in wind speeds up to and including F1 tornados, fully accommodating any of their customers in the shooting circumstances they may encounter from day to day. I'm sure the lack of such important functionality thus far was nothing more than an accidental oversight that somehow slipped through the cracks, and I'm looking forward to my next range trip to test out the fix - as soon as I find my trusty hat, that is, which somehow still managed to escape despite my improvised adhesive stampede strings.
On another note, I believe I'll need to either switch to heavy 115gr bullets in my Dasher to cut through the wind better, or perhaps start to offset my scope by 90° on breezy days like today to ensure enough windage turret travel. Even with only half of my actual wind speed input in the device, I was running out of adjustment range before 1,000 yards with my current 105 Hybrid load.
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