One thing about us, we don't like to give out the MOA drops in our reticles because there are people trying to reverse engineer them for fly-by-night Ebay clones. Instead we just tell folks to download Strelok Pro which has almost all of our reticles in it already and you can use that to calculate a custom offset if you need one.

Now, if someone was mathematically inclined they could run a bunch of numbers, compare bullet drop in MOA/MRAD to the drops in our reticles, and come close to reverse engineering the reticle, but then at least they would have to work for it. Handing out your reticle information to anyone who asks is the reason why there is always an active thread on "How can I tell if this EOtech is a fake?"

You guys know you can always hit me up with questions and I'm happy to run numbers too, either to confirm or to try to find a better solution. I do it all the time, it's part of my job and I enjoy it.

If you guys want my opinion on BDC vs. Mild-dot vs. MOA/MRAD grid, I'll make a post about it but it'll be a pretty big one, I should probably just write a blog article about it. Otherwise, I'll butt out and let the discussion continue between ya'll.

To toot my own horn just a bit, I ran numbers for a proposed BDC on .458 SOCOM on Friday. I had to call an ammo manufacturer and ask them about load data, because it's hard to find the detailed info needed to plug in. The ballistic coefficient for example (BC for the 500 grain subsonics is slightly better than an F350 Super Duty, LOL). I was able to come up with a couple of decent solutions that should be able to get guys hitting hog sized targets out to 250-300 yards with individual tweaks to their sight-in.

OK so what I'm saying here is my personal opinion and not official Primary Arms policy or anything, although I'm likely to reference our reticles since those are the ones I have the most experience with. If you want to defer to someone with superior experience, because your uncle was issued a Redfield Accu-Range back in World War Nam Storm and he swears it's all you'll ever need, ok, I'm not going to try to change your mind. This is just how I see it as a guy who does more shooting with all of these systems than the average bear, and sees how customers actually use our stuff.

1. Plain reticles. Duplex Crosshair, German #4, fine crosshair, etc. If you prefer this because the other reticles seem "too busy" that tells me the added information the other reticles provide is useless to you. You don't see the need for any other visual cues because you'll never use them, because the only kind of shooting you do is on a square range with targets at known distances, close enough that bullet drop isn't a factor. This isn't an insult-- I was that guy for a long time. The only ranges I had access to topped out at 100 yards and we had to shoot sitting down at a bench, the range officers wouldn't even let us shoot from prone. In this situation I just sighted in at 100 yards and that's all the rifle or myself ever got to to do. One shot every 3 seconds, please. And, I didn't know what I was missing. I never had to compensate for wind really, never had to worry about bullet drop, never had to worry about range estimation, any of that stuff. So hey, simple crosshair "always worked for me" as long as I was chained down to that kind of shooting. This can actually get pretty extreme-- benchrest shooters use second focal plane scopes with fine crosshairs, right? Their targets are always at 1000 yards, they always have a dedicated time opportunity to sight in before the match starts, and they use mechanical clicks for all corrections. So yay, people use a simple crosshair at 1000 yards, it can be done.

The downside of the simple crosshair is, if I had gone out on a hunt and spotted a lovely deer walking at an unknown distance past 200 yards, with a 10 mph wind pushing left to right, I would have to say "That's an impossible shot" with my setup and not even try it. Then the game becomes, can I stalk to within what I think is 100 yards of this deer and wait for the wind to die down, so I can take a shot that is within the limited capabilities of rifle and shooter. Honestly, if you aren't shooting out to a distance where wind calls matter or bullet drop matters, get a $150 red dot from us and enjoy superior speed up close, and spend the rest of the money on something else. You don't really need a 1-6x24 or a 4-14x44 to shoot stationary targets inside 100 yards.

2. BDC reticles. BDC reticles work great if you are running a fairly standard setup and standard ammo. The more closely your setup aligns with the "native" specifications of the BDC reticle, the better. Military guys have taken some pretty amazing shots with 4x ACOGs because the BDC for their issued optic is tuned specifically for the exact ammo (62 grain M855) and barrel length (14.5") of their rifle. In that case the BDC is dead on all the way out to 600 yards. If you take the same exact scope and you put it on a 20" M16A2 and you feed it 55 grain M193 ammo, you'll be close, maybe close enough to get a hit somewhere on target, but you won't be optimal. With a ballistic calculator like StrelokPro or BallisticAE you can come up with a custom "zero offset" where you sight in an inch high at 100 yards or something to help the rest of the BDC fall into line. You also might need to calculate a custom offset to account for other factors like weather or altitude above sea level. For example in our ACSS 5.56 system, if you are running 62 grain M855 through a 16" barrel, if you are 1000 ft above sea level we recommend zeroing half an inch high at 100 yards. If you are 2000 ft above sea level, zero dead on at 100 yards. If you are 3000 ft above sea level, zero half an inch low at 100 yards. So even with a BDC there is some ability to adjust and optimize accuracy. The advantage of a BDC is that once you've sighted in, you don't have to do math, you don't have to count clicks, you just hold over using the aiming cues which are labeled nicely for you. It's great for police and military applications where the rifle might sit in a truck for 6 months before being grabbed in an emergency by anyone wearing a uniform or badge. Bad guy at 300 yards, you think? Ok, hold to the hash mark labeled "3" and start shooting immediately, and you are likely to score a hit SOMEWHERE in the first few rounds. For military, police, or tactical competition style shooting, it's fantastic. If you have our ACSS reticle you can even estimate range through the reticle, compensate for wind conditions, or take shots at moving targets, if you understand how the reticle works. Is it busy? Yes, because it's offering you more information you can use to make a smarter decision about where to aim.  Speaking just for myself, I don't even see the parts of the reticle I'm not using at any given moment. I honestly forget the ranging ladders are there on our reticles because I've never used them, because all my shooting is still at targets of known distance in advance. So, my particular brain pretty much chooses to look right past the ranging ladder. Other guys might spend all their time being frustrated and angry that the damn ranging ladder is in the way and they've still never even used it ONE time... right?

3. Grid reticles. Grid reticles are the most accurate, but they come with a heavier workload. Reticle designers try to make the grids easy to navigate but the bottom line is that the numbers next to the grid are mathematical in MOA / MRAD, not actual yardage. So if you're hunting with a grid reticle and your hunting buddy uses a laser rangefinder to tell you that the deer is at 350 yards, and you get excited and hold halfway between the "3" and "4" hash marks on the grid reticle, you are likely to miss. Instead you need to remember your exact drops that you painstakingly calculated earlier, that your bullet actually drops 4.7 MOA at 350 yards so you need to hold just a bit high of the number "5" MOA hash mark to hit. I would never take a grid reticle out into the field without a pretty detailed dope sheet taped to the stock or to my forearm or something for quick reference, and even then, I'm going to be much slower to engage than I would be with a BDC (because I have to look away from my scope and target to reference my sheet-- hope the target isn't moving while I do this!). I trade speed for accuracy-- I have a higher chance of hitting that deer with my first shot, because this rifle is mine and I know everything about the bullet's behavior at various distances and winds, I calculated it all myself, and now I benefit from all that homework by taking a better first shot than I could with a BDC. This is especially true for non-standard configurations, like guys who are taking 12.5" 6.5 Grendel pistol builds out to 600 yards. That's pretty badass but nobody is going to make a BDC for that, right? They have to create their own BDC by doing the math ahead of time, and if they hand their rifle to a friend, their friend needs to reference the dope sheet and maybe get coached up by the rifle owner before the shot is taken. The knowledge about where rifles hit using a grid reticle is not easily passed from shooter to shooter, not standardized where someone can train on a specific configuration and then always be effective just by grabbing one rifle out of many.

The grid reticles also give you many more holdover points than a BDC does, which adds much more accuracy potential while also making the reticle even busier. Shooters who are averse to "busy" reticles have heart attacks when they look through an MOA grid, but if your game is to hit playing cards at unknown distances between 400 and 700 yards, it's the only way to go.

In summary:
Plain crosshair-- highly controlled shooting environments, or beginner level shooters
BDC-- maximum speed and ease of use, or intermediate level shooters
Grid-- maximum accuracy, speed penalty, maximum complexity, or advanced level shooters

MPBR zeroing is a whole different animal, but if you're experienced enough to run the numbers for MPBR why wouldn't you upgrade to something with even more capability than that? I generally think of MPBR as an iron sight or red dot tactic, where I don't have any other option and I'm trying to do a smart workaround because I've only got a 2 MOA dot or a chunk of metal to reference.

Almost all our reticles are illuminated, great for seeing all the reticle details perfectly even in low light. You don't even have to get a BDC or grid type, you could just do an ARC-2 MOA for example. No more squinting to see details. And it's not just us, reticle illumination is the norm not the exception in 2018.

Yeah but I already wrote a damn book there while I was on the clock at work, Rictus! LOL

Like I said, you could write a whole serious of blog articles about this stuff, and we are trying to. We have a "Scope University" section at the Primary Arms blog where we are trying to tackle a lot of this stuff.

Huck, do you use a grid reticle when shooting this way? If not, how do you like to account for wind?

I've been asking some folks I respect about their techniques for wind compensation, and I've seen some interesting answers, I'm trying to get a handle on what techniques are most popular and effective. One of the big features of our ACSS system is the wind hold dots, but it helps me be a better marketing guy when I understand what other folks are doing when not using our reticles.

Yeah, that's exactly what I'm referencing, although we don't call the ones that go to 600 a CQB reticle, technically. I'll tell a fun story real quick.

So, at 2018 SHOT Show we had our own shooting lane for the first time at Media Range Day. We brought three scopes and three rifles, all rifles were standard 16" AR15 carbines shooting Magtech bulk pack M193 ammo. We had our 1-8x Platinum ACSS scope, our 1-6x ACSS Raptor FFP scope, and our co-branded Trijicon ACOG TA31 4x ACSS scope. We had two steel targets in front of our lane, one at 100 yards and one at 500 yards. We had a pervasive 5-10mph wind pushing left to right all day long.

We had over 100 visitors come through the shooting lane and we blew through 2,000+ rounds of ammo that day. We were so slammed, I didn't even have lunch. I was so hoarse by the end of the day, I was worried I had trashed my voice for the rest of the week. I was spotting through my personal Bushnell spotting scope (because poorboi) and I managed to coach every single shooter to ring steel at 500 yards that day. Everyone who visited the lane hit the steel torso at 500, with no exceptions. Some of these shooters, especially the foreigners (there was a super cute cop from Brazil, dear God... but I digress), some of them had never fired a rifle past 50 yards in their whole life. To them 500 yards seemed impossible, it might as well be a mile away as far as they were concerned. But all I had to do was show them where to hold on the reticle, once they understood where the wind hold dot was for 500 yards, I got most of them to ring steel within 3 or 4 shots. Then we would hand them a new rifle and different scope and do it all again.

When they hit steel with the Raptor, I would oh-so-dramatically say "So you just hit a target at 500 yards on a windy day without doing any math or touching the turret, right? And this is a $400 scope with a lifetime warranty." Boy did their ears perk up at that. Best day at work ever!

Now, here's the really fun part. Right next to our lane was the lane for a very trendy, expensive laser-rangefinding-coupled optics company. Lets call them, I dunno, Pointing Track. You have to spend at least $4k to get in the door with these guys. Buying a fully integrated rifle system from them can cost up to $13,000. What their system does is, it turns your trigger into a "consent to release" button like the "pickle" button in a fighter-bomber. You don't press down the trigger to fire, you hold the trigger down as consent to release the shot, and when the system detects that your holdover angle matches the laser-calculated firing solution, it fires the gun for you at that precise moment. Cool huh? Except, it can't account for wind calls at all. So, I'm listening all day to their spotter calling out over and over again, "To the right... no, you're still to the right sir. To the right again, sir." The shooters were lasing the target, then pulling straight up to get their holdover and BAM the rifle would release and the wind would push the bullet clean away from the steel. The fact that we were achieving solid hits with a $400 scope that they could not match was just another reason why I consider that day my favorite day at work ever!

Here's some footage from that day as I'm spotting for my friend Ryan who goes by "Oregear" on YouTube. He's a great kid with a bright future. You can hear the wind. Ryan already has some ACSS stuff so he already knew the system and got on steel pretty much immediately. Skip to about 14:25, for some reason I can't do a link that's cued to a specific time in the video.


Best day at work. EVER.

Good stuff, Rictus.

Agreed. Which is why we don't just sell ACSS.

First: you can actually do a lot with a BDC reticle if you understand initial offsets. Here's the chart we put in the manuals for the 5.56 reticles showing people how to get started with different calibers at different velocities, different altitudes above sea level, etc. We aren't kidding ourselves, most of our customers don't read the manual, they just sight in at 100 yards and call it good 'nuff and assume it'll work out to the full extent of the BDC, and they have no way to really verify that until they go on the big hunt or whatever. That's totally not ideal.



The other thing about initial offset is pure shooter and gun accuracy. If a guy looks at the chart and it says sight in an inch high at 100 yards, but he's a new shooter and sights in his box-stock M&P Sport II with Tula ammo, he might throw a 5 MOA group on paper at 100. Then it's pretty hard to judge that hey, he achieved the proper offset to get the BDC to work. And then the same guy, well, he's going to be pretty disappointed at 400 yards. Then maybe he posts up an angry thread about how BDC reticles suck. Sighting in 1 inch high at 100 yards is a great idea-- if you and your rifle can actually hold 1 inch high at 100 yards. Everyone says their rifle is sub-MOA on the internet, but that's not what I see when I see folks shooting out there at the square range.

Awhile ago on another board I monitored a thread where this guy was upset that our BDC was way, way off at 500 yards, and he was hopping mad about it. Turns out he's in France shooting a 5.45 AK, and you can't get 5.45 ammo there, so he's handloading using fire formed brass that started out as a different caliber entirely, and his bullets aren't really 5.45x39 pills either, he's buying bullets of the correct diameter commercially. That dude should not be using a standardized BDC reticle.

I'm a huge believer in grid reticles for precision, which is why I'm excited about the upcoming Athena and Hera reticles, in MRAD and MOA respectively. Tie these in with a quality ballistic calculator and you can really do work, but that takes a whole other level of dedication to the craft of shooting and understanding things like barometric pressure and ballistic coefficient. For every person I talk to that wants to learn how to use StrelokPro or BallisticAE, I talk to 30 guys that say "I don't need all that bullshit I just want it to hit at 800 yards, ok?"

These images are huge so I'm just going to link them.
HERA Ballistic Precision Reticle is uniformly 1 MOA measurements throughout. Combine with 0.25 MOA per click turrets for excellent precision.

ATHENA Ballistic Precision Reticle is graduated in MRAD with measurements from 0.1 MRAD to 5 MRAD. Combine with 0.1 MRAD per click turrets and use the meters instead of yards for super easy numbers crunching.

R-Grid 2B replaces the center section of Athena with a bold horseshoe and chevron, which is much faster to acquire at low magnifications. By the time you get past the useful range of the center chevron, the MRAD grid takes over anyway.

What?

Ahh. I'm tracking now. Thats for ranging only, not a BDC. A quick and dirty ranging at that.

You range the bad guy with those 3 hashes and then you would either adjust your dials or hold over for that range.