Long Range Shooting: What is long range?

How do we define shooting long range.

Wikipedia defines long range shooting as "a collective term for shooting disciplines where the shooter has to engage targets at such long distances that he has to calculate ballistics, especially with regard to wind."Bryan Litz, Founder and President of Applied Ballistics LLC, defines long range as "where you need to make significant adjustments to your zero to hit a target due to gravity drop and wind deflection."

There are likely many ways to categorize what long range shooting means to people, but for the sake of these training materials, we are defining the various ranges as below, since we are going to be shooting long range:

* Short range is less than 300 yds.
* Long range is 300-1200 yds.
* Extra long (ELD) range is greater than 1 mile

Shooting at the range at the usual 1-200 yard distance requires very little compensation for all the factors that come into play at longer ranges, including some physics, a little trigonometry, and a few formulas to use for long distance shooting.

So the definition is essentially the difference between just shooting at the target directly, and having to make changes to your point of impact based on a number of factors you will be learning in this course.

In the U.S.-based shooting community, we tend to use the term MOA for how accurate a rifle system is, or how big a group or target is in size.

MOA refers to Minutes of Angle which is an angular measurement system that relates size to distance. 1 Minute of Angle, or 1 MOA, is considered the standard accuracy minimum for a long range rifle.

A rifle that is said to be a 'one minute gun' is capable of producing a group of shots equal to 1 MOA at any distance.

That means if the rifle is fired at a target 100 yards away we can expect the group size to be 1 inch in spread from the center of one shot to the center of the shot farthest from the group and if it's 1000 yards, it would be 10 inches in spread.