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Question re: do I need more elevation in my rail? (Or scope setup error?)

Macintosh

Private
Minuteman
Jul 10, 2018
34
4
I have a cz 455 with an area419 15moa rail. I’ve been shooting nrl22matches, including some longer local stages at each match, with my centerfire scope on it this winter (34mm tube), and just got a dedicated scope for this rifle(30mmtube). Todays match the longest target was 278 yards, and I was hitting it with 13.5 mills of elevation dialed. After the match I swapped to my new scope, zeroed at 50 yards same as before, and there is only 12.5 mills of travel in the turret after zeroing. I know the new scope has less travel than my centerfire scope, but I was a little surprised how little travel was left considering I already have a rail with some elevation built in. Does this sound like something is amiss, or is this fairly normal? And will simply swapping out to a 30min rail get me where I need to be? The new scope is a Viper PST gII 5-25 if that makes any difference. Thanks in advance.
 
Somebody way smarter than me should be along shortly but a quick seach shows that scope has 20 total mils available. That leaves you 10 up and 10 down when centered. Your 15MOA rail helped a little, but less than 5 mils total and you have to divide tbat by 2 so everything looks right, you have about 12.5 available up, should only have 7.5 available down which you don't typically use. Get more rail. In a perfect world 30moa should get you pretty close to a 50 yard zero and most of that 20 mils available for dialing-Norcal911
 
20 MOA of movement on the scope. When centered, you have 12.5 mils of downwards, 7.5 mils of upwards. 7.5 x 3.43 = 25.725. Meaning you could add another 20 MOA to the rail and try to maximize your downward travel (aka max shooting distance) while still having some slop. Heck, you could even run 25 more MOA, but that would be running a little too close to bottoming out.

If you added another 20 MOA to the rail, it would eliminate roughly 5.8 mils to upwards movement. Your new set-up would give you ROUGHLY 18.3 mils of downwards and 1.7 of upwards.

A 30 MOA rail would give you an additional 15 MOA, meaning your new set-up would give you roughly 4.3 additional mils of downwards, or a total of 16.8.
 
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Thanks! That makes sense, appreciate the help. Sounds like its probably not some wonky setup error then, and just normal for the rig. New rail it is, I guess. Anyone with a 30min rail they want to trade, hit me up!