I had a chance to break away Sunday and head to Quantico for a day at 1,000y. It started as a crisp 27 degrees with direct sun and no wind and eventually warmed to the mid 50's with about a 5mph wind. The issue was mirage, it was as bad as I've ever seen on the complex. I had to dial down 0.5mils and the left to right was a full Mil and I still sucked. It was so bad we couldn't call shots, we couldn't see the hits on steel and there was no auditory feedback.
I brought the new Swarovski STS-80 out for a test drive. The consensus was the glass was clear and bright, but most folks could not tell the difference between the STS-80 and for example, a side-by-side with a 80mm Vortex HD. Maybe it was the day, but the Swaro lets in more light and has no chromatic distortion that I could see, even close to the edge of the glass.
Getting ready for the day. On position 24 and waiting for the EMT to arrive on site so we we can un-case and go hot.
The AI Mandalorian edition made it's debut.
First shot is always at about 0800 so there was a rising sun, cold temps and no mirage. I dialed up for a very low density altitude and fired 4 rounds at the clays at 1035y to confirm windage, then dialed down for 1,000 and shot for the head on a 2/3rds IPSC. I was a tad off. You could still see hits and I even got a ping off the hit. Crappy iPotato photo through the Swarovski.
Confirmed:
The mirage started to come up after I had called shots and mentored for a couple of hours so it started to get brutal trying to determine hits - we could not see the red hit indicator lights on the targets either - I've never seen this before, even though we dialed down to about 15x. Here's a 10 shot target where literally thought I only had three hits. It turned out I had two misses.
Here's another target where I shot two five shot strings and again had no idea if I had hits. A check showed I didn't do too well. We all dialed down our scopes and did the same for the spotters, but there was so much target movement with the mirage it was just hard to confirm hits.
I went suppressed for the rest of the day and simply shot clays at 1035y. At least you could see the splash on the berm.
