Yes, a debate about zero's would hopefully help. I've guided a few hunters who really didn't understand how this all worked and I've had to follow up and recover a few animals because of it. Or, maybe it was just poor shooting blamed on lack of understanding zero's. It's really hard to sort out the truth sometimes under real field conditions and the fog of adrenalin.
My thinking on this subject has changed over the years as my hunting style has changed, the terrain has changed, the technology available to me has changed, and my understanding has changed. I began my hunting career in Florida, and I never shot a deer standing still until I had killed more than 20. My ideal deer gun was a savage 99 .250 Savage with receiver sights sighted in for 50 yards. That worked really well then and there. Eventually I did kill a deer standing still with this rifle at 210 yards, I thought of that as a long shot back then. And I didn't even realize that my Savage 99 when sighted in at 50 yards was also sighted in at 200 yards.
Now I understand that short range is 200 and 300 yards, mid range is 400, 500, and 600 yards, long range is 700, 800, 900, and 1,000 yards as defined by the NRA High Power Rifle rules but I had no clue back then.
When I first started hunting out west I followed the conventional wisdom of sighting in at 100 yards so that my bullets struck 1.8" high which according to the ballistics tables available then would put me dead on at 200 yards. I killed a lot of game this way, holding dead on if I thought they were 250 or less and over if I thought they were further. But I found that neither I nor my very skilled hunting buddies were very good at judging range once we were over the 300 yard mark. My solution to that problem was to flatten my trajectory so I built a 6.5 STW that fired 140 grain high bc bullets at 3450 fps.
At first I sighted this rifle in at 200 yards but eventually figured out I could sight it in at 300 yards and still not rise above the line of sight so much as to miss the vital organs of a deer, so I moved to that solution. It worked real well out to about 375 yards but once I was beyond 400 yards it again became a guessing game. This was before there were laser range finders, and even when they became available they were highly unreliable at longer range.
I can remember many times watching a coues deer buck across a canyon with several of my buddies laying there with spotting scopes discussing the range, our estimates were often different by 200 yards. On several occasions I've seen the actual shot taken be off by a whole body height of the deer, we were that far off.
Today there are very good solutions to the above problems, laser range finders are very good, if weather cooperates, scopes have better tracking and better custom turret solutions, and better thought out range estimation by reticle measurement. Today I wouldn't build my 6.5 STW and put up with it's fire breathing, barrel burning bad manors I would stick with a more mild mannered caliber like the 6.5 Creedmoor. Here is a little video to let you see what I'm talking about. Notice it is still sighted in so that the scope turret 0=200 yards.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2COAcHZRlI
This is a long winded round about way of saying that a 200 yard zero combined with a little knowledge and some range estimation tools is a pretty good place to be.
Bob
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Originally Posted by stokesrj
