Need help explaining ballistics

[Ukraina_lviv]

Good afternoon everyone,
I have been involved in precision rifle for about a year now and have enjoyed it so much that I am attempting to start a team at my college. We already have a combat shooting team, and I have the support of all of the NCOs at the school so the team will most likely be made official; however I have run into resistance in my request for certain calibers and bullets for the team to use. I asked for rifles to be chambered in 6.5mm Creedmoor and run Prime ammo through them, but due to the school already having a fairly substancial supply of .308 caliber weapons for other basic marksmanship programs the 6.5 request got shot down. I am fine with using .308 but the one thing they wouldn't budge with is using ball fmj ammo for the club. In my presentation I used the Applied Ballistics Weapon Employment Zone Calculator to demonstrate the difference between M80 and 175 fgmm as well as prime 6.5 and hornady 6.5 using data from my two rifles running those rounds and lots of pictures. So I need help further explaining why ball fmj is a bad idea for this sport?
Thanks,
Carter

 

[lash]

If you can get them to swing M118LR, you should be alright. It is "ball ammo", but should do fine out to 1000 and more. It is effectively FGMM as far as performance goes.

 

[bogeybrown]

Perhaps take a look at proposed courses of fire, max distances, etc and then do some real world analysis of the ball ammo you have on hand. Shoot over a chrono and document SD/ES and plot those shots correlated to a calculator to show dispersion based solely on ammo before wind, shooter error, etc factors in. Show the likely hit/miss percentages of the ammo in and of itself.

If you have enough interested shooters, y'all could probably go out of pocket on a case of FGMM ($200) and do a blind comparison across a course of fire and compare results. Do it at 100yds and at distance to show baseline accuracy.

It sounds as though you're working within an ROTC program or similar, so keep in mind that as far as the mil is concerned, ball ammo is good enough. Your best chance of a compromise may be doing a request for M118LR since it's already in the supply system.

Edit: sorry for the repeat, it appears lash and I were typing at the same time.

 

[...]

you do know VMI already has a smallbore rifle team, right?......i would recommend you get hooked up with them, especially if you really want to learn how to shoot.


regarding your team......what discipline are you planning on shooting in?......F class? Palma? PRS?

in all honesty, unless you are doing "target" shooting, or shooting at extended range........M80 would probably suffice,especially if its free..... i mean hell, its capable of holding 1.5MOA.

and like said before, M118 shouldnt be too hard to get your hands on either.

youll find, that when it comes to college sports... unless you are D1.....you take what you can get, especially if you are on the club level.......no one bends over backwards to please D3 and club teams.



another thing to remember is, its easy to get your panties all in a twist over "the most accurate" ammo.......but you need to remember the shooter is the weakest link in the system 90% of the time.....especially at long range.....i mean, with .308, a missed wind call of 1Mph is going to throw you wide by 2" at 500 yds.