Sterling
During the match last week, I snapped this photograph, it shows a rifle with a drop & drift chart.
How the shooter arrives at that number can come in a variety of ways. Because we are NOT talking about "old school" shooting techniques, but rather old school methods of figuring drop and drift.
As noted earlier, there is no "old school" formula out there in circulation that is designed to work 100% with any one cartridge & rifle combination. They all require some type of adjustment and because of the nature of math, that adjustment usually means a type of trial and error to reach the constant necessary to achieve utmost accuracy. Computers on the other can adjust for those changes and contain a library of data on a variety of cartridges. As well, they can model the atmospheric conditions better than a person can, especially when being feed direct data from a pocket weather station. We are not meteorologist so we cannot read the weather to the degree these devices can. The old school principle here is preparation, how the shooter chooses to prepare his data is one of choice. How he chooses to arrive at his answer that he will then use in the field. If we attempt to extract these answer in the field, we are distracted from the firing task.
Shooting, as we all know require some basic principles to work, still I think we can both point to a very good shooter who breaks a fundamental here and there. Consider the shooter with the light trigger press who "taps" the trigger and does not follow through. Logic around the fundamentals says, that should not work successfully, but yet we see examples of it everyday. One way to overcome this lack of fundamentals is to engineer a support system to "hold the rifle steady" thus allowing the shooter to compromise the fundamentals of marksmanship. In stead of a steady hold with bone support, we have a bipod or rifle rest. These aid the shooter, where his sling shooting would surely suffer his lack of support, his benchrest shooting is now competitive.
The technique of moving the sling from underneath the stock to the right side for a right handed shooter is still not widely used. But many of use feel putting the sling to the right side of the stock helps control a number of effects that you can't see when it is on the left or hanging from the bottom. It's all the same when it comes time to fire the rifle, but that small change is a modern technical change that might progress a shooter to another level. In practice it might only be noted by the very best, but still, the little things matter.
The math behind the computer is very similar, however they now have more factors to work with. They are not limited in their scope, they can adjust on the fiy to any rifle and bullet, something the long hand math cannot do without time consuming effort. there is still a formula driving the computer, but the power to combine more than one formula doesn't exist anywhere else but inside the chip. We can't do it with the Paper & Pen.
So yes, tech of this type is displacing it. Sure there will always be people who want to know "why" the computer arrived at that answer. But there is no longer a need too. We can focus on the task at hand, which is successfully engaging the target. How well a shooter prepares is really the debate...
Software is capable of producing an answer to a screen, or printer. That printed sheet can then be laminated and used under any condition on the planet. Why would anyone question specific data for the rifle & bullet combination vs a rule of thumb or worst, solution for a 308 when they are shooting a 6mm ? All the current "old school" wind drift formulas are designed around the 30 cal, it requires a whole series of work ups to change it.
That photograph was shot a week ago, look at the breakdown in ranges, the details was never seen 25 years ago.