I’ve blabbered about this gun and these two projectiles enough so I’m not going to make them the focus…
Last week I doped out 10-300 yards, comparing a pellet with a BC in the 0.046-0.049ish range, to a slug with a BC in the 0.09-0.1ish area. This was about a 6 hour project, spread over two days. The dope was actual on-paper results from 10-130 yards, and then on small dirt clods from 130-230 yards, and then using assistance from ballistics apps and continuation of the trajectory curve seen from actual results, to get those last 70 yards. Conditions weren’t amazing, but I shot enough of both the pellet and the slug at the various distances to have a fair level of confidence in the results.
Scope height over bore is null in this comparison (same gun, same scope, same barrel). Starting FPE is also fairly similar, just shy of 35 fpe with the slug and just shy of 30fpe with the pellet. Nearly the same average speed from both, 900-915 with the slug, and 910-920 with the pellet. Scope zero worked out to essentially 30-50 yards for the slug (2/10 mil hold-under for 37-40 yards) and 30-40 yards for the pellet (no hold-under). So pretty much the same scope zero.
The main differences in this comparison are of the BC, with the slug having roughly double the BC of the pellet.
Here’s the data, in the dope sheet-stickered-to-bottle format. Left column is distance, middle column is clicks (1/10mil) for the slug, right column is clicks for the pellet. (yes, combo of holdover and clicks to get to some of those farther distances).
Everything is fairly similar out to about 45 yards, at which time the slug starts to pull away, requiring less holdover. By 100 yards the pellets require more than a mil more elevation than the slug. By 150 yards the difference is almost 2 mils (1.8). At 200 yards, there’s more than 3 mils of elevation difference (3.3). And at 300 yards there is almost 9 mils more holdover required for the pellet than for the slug (8.8)! The pellet is quite literally dropping out of the sky at that point. One might even say that the slug shoots flatter than the pellet.
As for fpe retention. I added two columns to illustrate that…
By now, this shouldn’t be news to anybody in the industry, but SEEING it, is still quite thought-provoking. It also makes much more sense now that I can reconcile the numbers on paper with how many pass throughs I get on prairie dogs even out to 150+ yards.
And we’ve certainly got an orders of magnitude effect at play. In my little comparison, we’ve got a 34.9fpe projectile still quite dangerous out to 400+ yards. (11.7fpe left at 400 yards for mine). That fpe is all I want or need. But scale up the power levels to 100-120 or more FPE, and the even better BCs that are available from some of the .22 slugs these days…and you’ve got to be concerned about anything for what? Something like 1300-1400yards downrange? Or roughly 0.75 of a mile. That’s of course max range and with something like a 30 degree angle, similar to what we’d see if we were shooting starlings or euro doves out of a tree.
I apologize for the tangent, didn’t mean for this to be a “the sky is falling” but rather a reminder that….
BC is king.
Last week I doped out 10-300 yards, comparing a pellet with a BC in the 0.046-0.049ish range, to a slug with a BC in the 0.09-0.1ish area. This was about a 6 hour project, spread over two days. The dope was actual on-paper results from 10-130 yards, and then on small dirt clods from 130-230 yards, and then using assistance from ballistics apps and continuation of the trajectory curve seen from actual results, to get those last 70 yards. Conditions weren’t amazing, but I shot enough of both the pellet and the slug at the various distances to have a fair level of confidence in the results.
Scope height over bore is null in this comparison (same gun, same scope, same barrel). Starting FPE is also fairly similar, just shy of 35 fpe with the slug and just shy of 30fpe with the pellet. Nearly the same average speed from both, 900-915 with the slug, and 910-920 with the pellet. Scope zero worked out to essentially 30-50 yards for the slug (2/10 mil hold-under for 37-40 yards) and 30-40 yards for the pellet (no hold-under). So pretty much the same scope zero.
The main differences in this comparison are of the BC, with the slug having roughly double the BC of the pellet.
Here’s the data, in the dope sheet-stickered-to-bottle format. Left column is distance, middle column is clicks (1/10mil) for the slug, right column is clicks for the pellet. (yes, combo of holdover and clicks to get to some of those farther distances).
Everything is fairly similar out to about 45 yards, at which time the slug starts to pull away, requiring less holdover. By 100 yards the pellets require more than a mil more elevation than the slug. By 150 yards the difference is almost 2 mils (1.8). At 200 yards, there’s more than 3 mils of elevation difference (3.3). And at 300 yards there is almost 9 mils more holdover required for the pellet than for the slug (8.8)! The pellet is quite literally dropping out of the sky at that point. One might even say that the slug shoots flatter than the pellet.
As for fpe retention. I added two columns to illustrate that…
By now, this shouldn’t be news to anybody in the industry, but SEEING it, is still quite thought-provoking. It also makes much more sense now that I can reconcile the numbers on paper with how many pass throughs I get on prairie dogs even out to 150+ yards.
And we’ve certainly got an orders of magnitude effect at play. In my little comparison, we’ve got a 34.9fpe projectile still quite dangerous out to 400+ yards. (11.7fpe left at 400 yards for mine). That fpe is all I want or need. But scale up the power levels to 100-120 or more FPE, and the even better BCs that are available from some of the .22 slugs these days…and you’ve got to be concerned about anything for what? Something like 1300-1400yards downrange? Or roughly 0.75 of a mile. That’s of course max range and with something like a 30 degree angle, similar to what we’d see if we were shooting starlings or euro doves out of a tree.
I apologize for the tangent, didn’t mean for this to be a “the sky is falling” but rather a reminder that….
BC is king.
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