(10-27-2025, 06:06 PM)Ninurta Wrote: I'm not really qualified to have an opinion on this rifle, since I'm not a long-range shooter. The longest shot I've ever personally made was about 600 meters from one mountain side to the next, with a Remington 700 chambered in .243 that had a bull-barrel and the biggest damned scope I've ever seen on a civilian rifle, I'm almost certain it was just a lucky slop-shot, which I've had a history of making. If I hit something at a distance, or something I couldn't see when the trigger was squeezed, it's just a lucky slop shot.
The longest shot I've ever witnessed was in Bosnia, made by a guy using a captured Russian SVD Dragunov firing 7.62x54R Russian. It was made at about 1200 meters, hitting an officer taking a piss off the top of a cliff on the other side of a gorge, which he thought kept him safe. He made a bad bet. The gorge and cliff did, however, retard pursuit long enough for the sniper team to make good their escape. The ignominy of having the boss shot dead while taking a leak probably also helped delay pursuit.
Generally speaking I confine myself to shots I know I can make, which avoids a lot of ribbing. If I make one by luck that I wasn't sure of, then that's just a slop shot. I never call a shot like that in serious circumstances, only in informal cases for beer-bets. That way, If I miss I'm only out a few beers rather than my one-and-only precious life.
So,I'm not really qualified to say whether lugging a 15 pound rifle over hill and dale, along with spare barrels, bolt faces, and magazines for quick-caliber-changes is a good idea or not. That's out of my wheelhouse, so I'll leave it to the professionals to make that determination.
I think it would be a good idea for the generals to leave that decision in professional hands, too, but that ain't how generals usually work.
I will say, though, that I do not believe that any Ukrainian ever made a 4 kilometer kill with a rifle, drone-assisted targeting or not. I believe that's just another attempt at propaganda coming out of that war, and a piss-poor one.
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When I got out of the Army, I became heavily invested in 3 Gun, and eventually, PRS competitions. I found it kept me very active and was quite useful at maintaining and even improving myself and my marksmanship. Let me be clear, I never went through the Army's Sniper Course... My astigmatism disqualified me out of the gate. That's neither here nor there, but what is important, to me at least, is that some of the guys I would compete against during these PRS events were actually former snipers, and they are insanely skilled... But the key thing they would hammer down over and over again to anyone who asked their advice was the importance of the mental and physical aspects of "Software" vs the purely mechanical aspects of "Hardware." Which I absolutely agree with...
...And then they'd caveat that with the necessity of ridiculously expensive glass.
To your point about lugging spare barrels, bolt faces, etc... along with a 15 lb monstrosity of a rifle all over creation though, I don't think that's the actual intent. Changing calibers in the field on the fly doesn't sit right with me purely because of the fact that Point of Impact can shift, even minutely, even when switching back to the original barrel... Hell let's say it's as little as .05mil in any direction... Well, that's still a .5cm shift at 100 meters that you can't account or plan for... Stretch that out to 1500 meters? That could be the difference between a hit, and just exposing your position. Not mention that when switching calibers, you would now have to carry all the data from the previous time you used that caliber and "re-zero" the rifle for that caliber without a firing a test group... No, I think the idea is to lessen the load on basic, background logistics. Instead of shipping and inventorying 4 different rifles, each with their own case.. You now only worry about 1 rifle with 4 barrels, all of which can fit in 1 slightly larger case... And then set the rifle up for each individual intended mission. That's the logic I'm speculating they're actually going for anyway...
Also, I do raise an eyebrow in regards to the Ukrainian 4km kill as well. Especially considering the "Drone Assisted Targeting" bit...