Re: Why MIL/MIL not MOA/MOA?
Distance to target should become irrelevant if you shoot enough. You should NOT think in terms of inches, feet, yards, centimeters, or meters to determine your bullet drops. Instead you should start thinking in terms of mils or moa. You should think of how much Mils or MOA you need to come up based on how many Mils or MOA your target takes up on the reticle.
It will work something like this:
- "Haji is 5 MOA accross". This means I need to come up 7 MOA on my elevation"
- "I missed to the right by 2 MOA, which means I have to go 2 MOA to the left"
The only thing Mils has over MOA is the calculation of the actual distance measurements, which is not really needed when you are shooting as I already stated.
Mil-radians works in thousandths which is perfect for the metric system. Mils work like a machinist, everything is in 10ths and 1000ths. Nothing is better for 10ths and 1000ths than the metric system. The metric system just kicks ass.
MOA works like a woodworking smith. Everything is split into halves, and halves of halves, and halves of halves of halves, such as quarters, eights, sixteenth, etc.
You can use Mils for the English Measuring System, but it is very difficult. Nothing is separated by 10's like the metric system. You have special number to get to a different unit. 12" makes one foot, 3 feet makes one yard, etc.
Because the English Measuring System is whacked, you can't use Mils quickly with the English System. What's 1/1000th of 100 yards? It is .10 yards, but what the hell is .10 yards? No one really knows off the top of their head what .10 yards is. It's actually 3.6" (360 inches in 100 yards), hence where the number 3.6 comes from, it's 3.6" per mil per 100 yards.
With metric it's easy. 1/1000th of one kilometer is one meter. 1/1000th of 100 meters is 10 cm. Easy as pie.
Another argument against MOA is the inconsistencies of the word MOA itself. There are 2 types of MOA, true MOA (1.047" per 100 yards) and IPHY (inches per hundred yards, 1" per 100). However, everything is labeled MOA, so we never know if the label is referring to True-MOA or IPHY. Ballistic Calculators uses true MOA. We calculate in our head with IPHY. Some scopes come with IPHY knobs, and some come with MOA knobs. Some scopes have it where their true-MOA reticle matches their true-MOA knobs, some don't.
With Mils there is no confusion as one Mildot is always one Mildot
But the bottom line is as long as your turrets matches your reticles (MOA, IPHY, or Mils), you can be good with anything.
Now having said all that, and even though I said I should NOT think of my target in English or Metric length measurements (meters, feet, etc), I still do it. I prefer MOA/MOA or IPHY/IPHY, because I like to think of how far my target is away in yards, and how far my misses are in inches.
With MOA (true-MOA or IPHY) this is easy to do for me to do.
Soapbox Speech: I can't help it that I naturally think of lengths in inches, feet, yards, and miles. I am going to blame my parents, grand parents, and all my idiot friends for this one for keeping the Imperial units instead of going to the Metric System. The English Measurement System is one case of how just because everyone is doing it doe not make it right. Then again, I know most idiots will always disagree with me and this how I know things are normal. Once I start to get idiots to agree with me, that probably just means I too became an idiot and it is time I put a bullet in my own head
