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breamfisher
Senior MemberPosts: 13,871 Senior Member
I wonder why... Magazine Gun Tests

Looking at some issues of Guns and Ammo I saw that the author had a table with the loading of the bullet, velocity, standard deviation of the velocity, and average group size. In the article he pointed out that the load with the largest average group size also produced the smallest group. It got me wondering: why don't the authors report some metric of the actual variation in group size. Be it standard deviation, standard error, variance, or just the range in group sizes. Seems to me that might be a bit more useful in determining the accuracy and performance of a firearm over the standard deviation of a certain load. In my mind, a load's standard deviation is more dependent on the ammo manufacturer than the rifle manufacturer...
I'm just here for snark.
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Luis
Edited to add: for what it's worth, I'm in data analysis mode at work. Can you guess that?
I feel your pain but a lot of folks ain't too saavy in the math stuff. :bang:
I would just tell the authors to print their data and let the readers do their own analysis. I'd be happy with that, just sayin.
How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and [how] hard it is to undo that work again! -- Mark Twain
Most load info I find in magazines is useless to me for the most part. It's usually used to bolster the advertising for ammo or firearm.
Shoot 1000 rounds of ammo "A" through a test fixture and report the spread and standard deviation. That's more useful to me when seeing how good an ammo is loaded.
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Bream, you raise some very good questions here. But you also might want to remember that a certain load in one rifle might give different results in another one (Same brand and model) just like what is a max safe load in one rifle may be an over load in another. The old adage that every rifle is an entity unto itself holds very true here. I read all this too, and I admit I have tried loads I read about in magazines. But more often than not I didn't get the same results in my rifle. It can be a crap shoot.
Son that's somebody with nothing to do with his time but keep me in trouble with mom.
D
Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.... now who's bringing the hot wings? :jester: