I wrote this in another thread a while back discussing all of the tacticool snipers I'd run into every weekend when I lived in Florida and went to the Manatee 1000yd range.
70% of the people would show up and I'd know what was about to happen just by seeing their Rem700 decked out with every milspecDEVGRUreconsealranger thing you can think of, matching krylon paint job, drag bag and all sorts of shit 'good enough' spotting scopes. If they didn't manage to progress that far yet, their woodland BDUs and jungle boots with matching sun hat let me know they were well on their way. Ocassionally there was even face paint, because, the sun was out or something.
The evolution was almost identical throughout the years; it was like there was some 'how to' out there everyone followed. I caught myself putting up with the 45 min drive some weekends just so I can get out there to see what todays episode was going to be. I also made myself a goal of never talking to any of them as to not disturb the process; kind of like when you come back in time with a time machine, and you cant disturb certain aspects as they would have undesired results in the future.
So they'd all show up with their full 'milspec' stuff (even though half of it wasnt) and were all under the impression that this was the key to everything; therefore they should be able to make a .5 inch group at 900 yards with it 'if they did their part'.
- Step 1. Rezero the rifle, every time you come to the range. None of them understood why the rounds were low/high in relation to the zero they spent 60 rounds trying to figure out the last time when it was 96 degrees out and the next time when it was 60 degrees and raining the gun would always shoot low and not match up to whatever manual DOPE card they had started to make last time. So the concencus was; you needed to rezero the gun everytime before you shot because the zero never stays the same. Man, it must suck to be a sniper in the military and have to rezero your gun like 3 times a day.
- Step 2. Talk about it with all of the other tacticools, all the time. Is your scope zero wandering? My BDC numbers on this turret don't match up. I must have bumped it on the ride home last time. Am I supposed to use the exact same ammo each time? It's all 168g 308WIN, its the same right? Maybe I need to get it bedded and it will stop doing this. Is that MILSPEC? Do you have an allen wrench that fits my scope cap? I should probably clean it again after shooting 10 rounds, maybe the bore is fouled and causing this.
- Step 3. Assemble a mobile cleaning kit station that you brought with you. This consisted of shit like plastic rolling toolboxes, loading down drag bags with pounds upon pounds of cleaning shit, or one guy even had some sort of stroller thing he fucking strapped a Tipton gun vise to. The cleaning games commenced. Shoot and clean after every round...every 2nd...5th? Noone knew. Let's spend 2/3 of our time cleaning the fucking barrel. Maybe I need a copper cleaner? Do you use foam? How long do you leave it in? OMG you're using a nylon brush. Should I leave some oil in the barrel after? You didnt clean it until the patch comes out looking brand new!
- Step 4. The arms race. At some point when the tacticools had reached peak lingo/cleaning prowess/rezeroing status, it was determined that better equipment was necessary. Some of them, by pure luck, where probably right as they now wanted a McMillan stock over their piece of shit Hogue rubber stock, or wanted to replace those no name rings with something that didn't suck, but for the most part, they were trying to figure out what would help them actually hit something. I need a better/bigger bipod. I need a heavy bench rest. Maybe I'm using the wrong color spraypaint. I could hit that 500 yard target if I bought a M107. They'd then come back the next week with their new gadget and new problems would arise, making them start some parts of their 'process' over again due to it; or just outright blame the new part.
- Step 5. Math class. If wind was ever taken into a calcuation, it was at the shooter and for the most part, done via someones version of 'the bush is doing this, so the wind is 5mph'. Everyone still had MIL reticles and MOA turrets. The math to figure shit out literally took 4 people like some kind of throwback organic supercomputer that calculated we had won the Vietnam war 2 years before we ran the calculations on when we could win. You'd hear them trying to convert things from MOA to MILS and back again, doing the same calculations with 3 of them getting a different number and then the real math discussion began. They would also use constants for wind that they got out of some FM from 20 years ago, for a bullet they weren't shooting at a velocity the constant was for. Calculators became a mainstay in their very neat and clean data books that consisted of new data, from a new zero, on the same gun, from everytime they had been out there before.
It would progress from there. The main thing was, none of them, ever figured out that temperature and enviromentals existed.