All About Riflescope Reticles

By MeccaStreisand

A reticle is simply a set of markings inside an optical device for use in measuring, pointing, aiming, etc... My 8" Newtonian telescope comes with an eyepiece that you can use for aligning the telescope with the Earth properly so its drive motor pre-programming can drive it to pre-determined astronomical points of interest automatically. Inside that eyepiece is a reticle of sorts, there are several stars and constellations. You adjust the scope to place the legs level and the aiming arrow facing north and adjust the telescope so that those reticle elements are placed on the actual image of them in the sky. Once the reticle and the real stars are aligned, the telescope is aligned. Nifty huh? It's really a bigger pain than it's worth but super useful if you want to use the tracking feature so the telescope moves with the stars so you can do very long time exposure pictures.

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In weapon scopes we have quite a lot of variety. Part of that comes from the variety of weapon types and part comes from the variety of ways those weapons may be utilized. There is such a thing as a general purpose rifle scope which would tend to come with a general purpose reticle. Anything that's meant to be general purpose can be pressed into service for most needs but it's not going to be optimal for probably any of them. This means it's important to select your reticle with the same pickiness that you'd select your rifle, your ammo or your boots. Make sure it's up to the task.

Reticle designs have exploded in number and manufacture method in recent years. As people have crafted new solutions to new and old problems, the number of reticles and their specialization has dramatically increased. What many will find surprising is how astonishingly old most of the technology used today is. There is some exciting technology that's been developed in more recent years but the fundamental method for creating a reticle hasn't changed in centuries.

Reticle Manufacture Methods
Wire/Hair:

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In the oldest days you may have had a simple crosshair which would have literally been a pair of intersecting spiderwebs (which are astonishingly strong and flexible) or actual hairs or wires tied or glued between points inside the scope. Primitive and fragile though they are, they solve the first problem: The aim point. Now there is one instead of just a view of some section of the target with no identified center. They're also super easy to manufacture.

Before long it was realized that there was a growing need for more sophisticated aiming points and for those points to be useful for intelligence gathering. Thankfully the technology to make such a thing had existed for a very long time already. One problem a wire crosshair will not normally experience is flecks of debris appearing to float on or around the reticle. That normally only happens with etched reticles, which brings us to:

Etched:
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As early as the 1700's crafty people were thinking of etching a reticle onto glass. This practice allows extreme flexibility in reticle design as floating elements can be very easily accommodated. This is the dominant system in top quality magnified rifle scopes today. Some have said that etched reticles are less durable than wire (Wikipedia). I would dispute the hell out of that.

A genuine problem brought in by etching is that the etched bit will disperse some light thereby lessening transmission marginally. Etched reticles are more expensive and difficult to manufacture and they are able to rotate which is annoying and unhelpful and requires advanced adhesive technology or mechanical impingement systems. Where wire hairs may break under the stress of a big shock (like dropping the rifle), etched reticles may also rotate after a big shock or flecks of debris may find their way onto the lens element with the reticle etched into it. Etched reticles exist on their own hunk of glass which brings in many more of its own issues to be dealt with.

Reflex/Reflected
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Reflected reticles aren't inline with the incoming light like wire and etched reticles. Reflected (called Reflex) reticles are literally projected onto a lens at an angle and the image reflected back to the shooter superimposed and collimated with the target image. The AimPoint CompM2 uses this system as do many red dot sights. The need to project light onto the lens through which the primary image is coming means that there's a sort of minimum line width and brightness which is pretty beefy when compared to a wire or etched reticle. There's also the potential problem of bloom.

Bloom is not entirely common anymore but it consists of a scatter effect like looking into bright lights at night. Reflex reticles which are high quality will not exhibit bloom. Because there are no physical parts of the reticle as such you can get very creative about reticle design just like with etched reticles. Battery life with these can be ridiculously long (on the order of years of power-on running) because of the low power output needs of the illuminator.

Holographic:
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Holographic reticles are much like Reflex reticles in that they use light to bring the reticle to life. Unlike Reflex sights that project light onto an interior surface to form the reticle, a holographic sight uses an etching on a lens element in the primary optical path which is illuminated by collimated laser diode. It's a bit like a mixture of an etched reticle with an illuminated/reflex reticle. Similar to Reflex sights, holographic sights can suffer from bloom. Battery life with these can be poor compared to a Reflex sight due to increased power needs to illuminate the hologram. Eotech 512.A65's use this system.

Reticle Focal Plane:
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Focal plane is pretty simple to understand. First focal plane refers to the placement of the reticle element literally near the front of the scopes internals, in front of the magnification lenses with one result being the reticle is the same angular size relative to the target or object being viewed. If I were to wear a t-shirt with a big X on it and walk towards you, you'd see the X get bigger and bigger because it's attached to me.

Second focal plane refers to the reticle always staying the same size. This can be modeled by placing a big wire X a few feet in front of you and having the target move toward you but not having the X move. The X would appear to stay the same size while the targets apparent size would continuously change. Each has its place. This only matters with variable magnification scopes. With a fixed power scope, since magnification never changes, the actual location of the reticle becomes largely immaterial other than for details of manufacturing.

All About Riflescope Retcles

First Focal Plane:
First focal plane reticles are necessary if you want to use a reticle for estimating range to target and to be able to do so at any of the available magnification levels of your optic without having to take additional steps in the math or limitations such as setting the magnification to a specific level. FFP reticles are wildly popular in the tactical/tacticool/sniper/long-range worlds where you're shooting for hits rather than for X's. FFP scopes will be more expensive than second focal plane if that's the only difference between them. The reason is simple, another lens near the front of the scope. It's a small and necessarily finely crafted lens with an exactingly precise reticle etched into it and it's placed very far toward the front of the system of lenses by necessity.

Small things that are super finely crafted and placed deep inside complicated mechanisms are expensive. That's how making things works. The lines inside the reticle on a FFP scope are at precise angular distances from each other and can be placed over other elements in the image to compare angular size. If you know the angular size and the actual size of the thing you're looking at you can deduce how far away it is. When you increase magnification on an FFP scope the crosshair will appear to grow in direct proportion to the apparent size of the target.

At low magnifications a FFP reticle may be little more useful than a standard Duplex. At high magnifications it may occlude quite a lot of the image of the target. That's not going to be super helpful to people shooting for X's but it is a very fast way to range and hold-off and allows the shooter to rapidly engage targets using lower magnification or to precisely compensate for wind, movement, etc... without having to fuddle with turrets at higher magnifications.

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Second Focal Plane:
Second focal plane reticles are desirable any time you want a fine reticle to stay one apparent size as magnification of the background image changes. It might seem odd to some reading this, but sometimes folks do want that feature. Because the lens is placed closer to the rear of the scope and not deep inside its guts there's typically a little more room for using a larger lens element, or even for just stringing a pair of wires across each other (some still do that).
Because it's SFP the lens element with the reticle can more durably be installed and it's easier to fabricate, easier to install and cheaper because of that.

Just because a scope is SFP doesn't mean it's not as good as a FFP scope. They have their purposes, each of them. Second focal plane scopes are extremely popular in target shooting applications where group size is measured and for hunting. If you're shooting for X's you're going to be best served by a SFP scope because it will obscure the least of the target at the higher magnification levels. SFP are more or less standard on hunting scopes as well though not by any means universal.

Reticle Layout:
Fine, Duplex, Post, Mil-Dot, Circle, Target Dot, Christmas Tree, Hunter Ranging, SVD or any of a hundred others. Which one is right for you? You want the least complicated reticle that can do the job you need it to do as a general rule. Below we'll introduce some common reticles and some not so common ones and give a brief blurb about common uses for each. This is by no means going to be comprehensive because much like a screwdriver handle occasionally will become a hammer, a target scope sometimes will get used for hunting. Neither works perfectly for off-book use cases but they can be made to work in a pinch.

Fine:
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A fine crosshair is the simplest reticle that's in common use. Two fine lines are crossed to form the X or t or whatever letter you wanna call it. They're typically pretty fine and their width can be controlled by using wider or narrower wire to make them if using wire/hair/spiderweb. In low light situations these can be very difficult to see and if they're the old school type that are actually made of hair or spiderweb or wire then breakage is a concern (several people have debated me about this but the author has personally experienced this a number of times). Benchrest shooters, people shooting for X's and those shooting for group size will quite often choose this layout along with extremely high magnification as it obscures the least possible amount of the target so they can see their bullet holes, even from a great distance and even with very small bullets.

Duplex:
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Duplex reticles are a fine-ish crosshair in the center that grows to be quite wide nearer the edges. The transition is normally abrupt with a very short angled taper. These are just about perfect for hunting non-dangerous big game with a rifle. Low light situations are helped by the wider lines and precision isn't hampered because the crossing lines are still fine. The thicker lines guide your eye naturally to the center so they'll much more easily pick up the fine hairs in low light. This is probably the most popular reticle in the USA and is used on the vast majority of hunting rifles that are equipped with a scope. Some companies have made FFP versions (the 30/30 reticle for example) but most are on SFP scopes.

German #3/Post:
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Also called the German reticle, it provides a very open field of view with minimal stuff going on and is ideal for hunting dangerous game and was heavily used in early European scopes. The thick center vertical post is quick to pick up even in low light. The pointed top of the post allows combat sniping precision without a temptation for the sniper to spend too much time refining their aim point. The thick horizontal bars at the edges help the sniper avoid canting the rifle and the whole thing is easy to see in low light. The reticle is simple to make as etched reticles go and lacks ranging stadia.

For German snipers in WWII this was very effective. When hunting dangerous game or hunting in a dangerous environment the lack of extraneous markings makes for a high level of situational awareness and increased speed of use. Things don't always need to look fancy to be sophisticated. This reticle could be seen as the foundation of the much more sophisticated SVD type discussed further below though that's really more visual similarity than anything directly derivative.

Mil-Scale/Mil-Dot:
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Scopes with reticles with miliradian subtends can be used very easily for range estimation and provide a brilliant method of fire correction. There are 2*Pi radians in a circle which isn't helpful for most people. In the interests of not making you do math, suffice it to say that for 1 radian there are about 57degrees of arc. That's a huge amount of arc so we cut it into 1000 little pieces which are very approximately .3 minutes of angle each (which works out to about .36 inches at 100yards). There are 60 minutes in each degree so we're talking about a very fine set of intervals which allows very small differences in target size to be helpful in estimating target range which makes for great precision.

Why not use minutes of angle? When using Mils/MRAD everything we do is in base10 and we tend to do it with metric measurements of the target and world which makes for easy math. Minutes of angle on the other hand uses base60 (thanks ancient fertile crescent residents for this hellish system of mathematics) and the SAE measurement system (feet/inches) is base12. Base60 and base12 are compatible in places (12*5=60 right) but they're not easy to mix in your head and few of us have 12 fingers to count on to help.

Scopes with their reticles in mil-scale and with mil-scale turrets (or with MOA scale reticles and matching MOA turrets but, that's another section) make fire corrections ridiculously simple, especially if you use metric linear measurements for target size and range. With a scaled reticle like these and turrets in MRAD you can watch where your bullet landed, measure it in the reticle, adjust exactly that much up/down/left/right and fire. There's no converting to or from minutes of angle and no guesswork about actual inches and subsequent division to do to figure out how many clicks to adjust. Scopes with mil-scale reticles are wildly popular in many forms of shooting including PRS, Long Range Tactical, 3-Gun, etc… as well as with tactical/SWAT units of police departments and military snipers.

MOA-Scale:
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This is more or less the same as a mil-scale but instead of using miliradians they will use minutes of angle or some fraction thereof. All the same basics in use case apply from mil-scale to moa-scale. There are reasons to use a MOA-scale reticle and it's entirely probable that if you need one, you know it and know why, otherwise it's just a preference issue.

There is also a sub-type of MOA scale which is not literally MOA: IPHY or inch per hundred yards. 1MOA is 1.05 (or 1.09 depending on how you measure) inches at 100 yards. Because different scope companies have different ideas of how to measure 1MOA, some companies decided to say the heck with it and adopted another system which is exactly 1 inch at 100 yards. The math is much easier to do in your head without extraneous decimal places in the significant digits.

While IPHY is by definition not MOA it's very very similar. Both have smaller linear distances covered at any distance than MRAD with IPHY having the smallest subtended linear distance. The small value lends itself to a smaller click value and the ability to dial more precise adjustments. For target shooters an IPHY scale may make sense. For those that just can't grok the metric system of linear measures, the MOA scale is probably up your alley (though you should really learn the metric system for your own benefit) and if MOA is too much of a pain, IPHY makes a good fist of simplifying it.

All About Riflescope Reticles

Circle/CQT/CQC:
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These used to be nearly exclusive residents of the realm of shotgun scopes but someone figured out that they make brilliant combat reticles as they're super fast and easy to use. Put your target in the circle and kill it. Simple. The open design is good for situational awareness as well.

Now we're starting to see really clever things like circle reticles being placed in the second focal plane and a secondary crosshair or scaled reticle being placed in the first focal plane in the same scope. This in theory enables the shooter to engage long range precision targets as well as deal with high intensity combat at conversational or hollerin' distances. That combination is finding more and more appreciation within the 3-gun world as well but still has its home in genuinely deadly use cases. This is a case of everything and the kitchen sink. It's not going to be perfect for most anything except for giving someone in battle or specific sorts of competition shooting a leg up if they're inclined to get well drilled with its employment.

Target Dot:
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This may consist of a simple dot in the center of the field of view but is more commonly combined with a fine crosshair. The dot may cover anything from 1/8moa to 3moa or more. These are popular with many sorts of target and varmint shooters. The tiny dot moving over your target gives an easy to see and fast to pick up signal to the brain to pull the trigger while the fine crosshairs give an aid in not canting the rifle.

In metallic silhouette competition these are wildly popular especially in combination with very high magnification scopes that are otherwise very difficult for the average shooter to use. Varmint hunters seem to really like the hair:dot system as well as many target disciplines which go by X count or group size or both. Many of those same shooters eschew the dot as it can obscure small aim points, and lively conversations on the matter around the water cooler can often be heard where they're used.

Christmas Tree:
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These are a more recent development as far as riflescopes go but have some history in other realms. These have gained significant popularity across the shooting world in recent years. These consist normally of a first focal plane mil-scale cross-hair reticle which is then decorated with elevation and windage stadia in something of a pyramid below the primary horizontal cross-hair.

While pretty busy in the eye these reticles allow for the user to hold off from the center of the target to account for range, wind and movement without having to twist the turrets. That makes these a potentially incredibly fast scope to use particularly on ultra challenging PRS courses because you can transition from close targets to far targets without having to tinker with your scopes turrets and account for movement and wind at the same time. Horus has come up with a pretty big selection of this type of reticle.

When selecting this type of scope reticle for use it's important to know about how much training you'll need to do to be proficient with it as well as picking the design that well suits your needs. These make a pretty marginal scope for shooting for groups or X's in competition. They're fantastic for speedy target acquisition and engagement in tactical and simulated tactical pursuits. Some have used them for long range hunting pursuits with what seems to be astonishing success. The author isn't sure if that's an emergent property of the tool and the use case benefitting a more or less average shooter, or if it's still a case of the shooter being incredibly skilled and the equipment not hurting their success or some other interesting mix of things.

Ballistic Drop Compensating/Hunter Ranging:
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Ballistic Drop Compensating (BDC) reticles come with additional intersecting lines on the vertical post that correspond to various ranges based on your muzzle velocity and bullet choice. These are fine for short to intermediate ranges but rapidly lose veracity as range increases. Up to about 400-500 yards they're great but after that actual ballistics should be referred to to assure a humane harvest of your target animal.

Some of these reticles like the Bushnell 30/30 (which appears to be a regular duplex until you find out it's first focal plane) are meant specifically for deer hunters so they can quickly range their target. There's a long running debate in some circles about whether including ranging and distance compensation features in a hunting scope is really worthwhile or if it'd be better to either not have them or to get a scope with those features fully implemented, like a mil-scale scope.

While mil-scale reticles and MOA scale reticles have their secondary line intersections at precisely equal angular distances, BDC type reticles almost uniformly do not place the secondary aim points at even intervals. This makes them more difficult to train on, memorize and apply to new situations and environments. BDC reticles are generally limited to ~.5km distances (with some very notable exceptions including sniper scopes like the MST-100) and should be employed with the understanding that things like air temperature and barometric pressure really start to matter after that.

For people with a small area of operations and a mission profile that allows for shots being limited to 500m or under these are actually pretty good options for shooting at dinner. For target use, they're generally inappropriate but like a screwdriver handle can become a hammer, a BDC scope can be pressed into service as a target scope with some performance consequences.

SVD:
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A fairly unique reticle that's more or less limited to eastern bloc Soviet aligned countries' sniper rifles and is very similar to some new and innovative custom reticles (THLR.NO for example). This reticle is actually a series of them. There's a ranging box meant for use with human and human sized targets to provide rapid range estimation. There are chevrons which provide hold-overs and there is a horizontal mil-scale for hold-offs and whatever else you find you need them for.

While being possibly the foundation of the ideal universal reticle the SVD reticle just hasn't caught on with western shooters like those above have. It's not meant for precision but instead, and in a very Soviet way, for combat. It's meant to allow marginally trained designated marksman to put reasonably accurate fire against human and materiel targets from range with the least amount of hassle (training) possible.

Where western armies developed doctrine that used snipers as force multipliers and intelligence gathering resources, the Soviets seemed less interested in having front line troops reporting intel back up and more happy to have them just go ahead and engage the enemy. Again, pretty standard Soviet thinking and they developed the PSO-1 (SVD) reticle specifically for this mission. They really did understand ever since WWII that effective use of large numbers of designated marksman does sap the heck out of your enemies will to fight and their ability to freely move around and this sort of reticle is ideal for that. It's not very good at all as a target reticle for any pursuit where you're counting group size or X's but like everything, can be pressed into service with consequences.

Choosing the Right Reticle:
First: Remember that a fine crosshair is about the standard minimum. Every reticle feature or element that you add in after that will either increase the cost of your final product, orient your scope for use in one pursuit or another or force the manufacturer to reduce its quality to maintain profitability. So, keep it as simple as you can and don't buy what you won't use. We all want the whizz-bang-est scope in the world. It's nice to own the best when the best is measured by its cost, makes you feel rich. In this case though the best is that which accomplishes the mission without costing you anything extra.

While you're shopping around decide if you need first or second focal plane first. This will be the thing that limits your available selection the most. If you shoot competitions at unknown ranges then first focal plane is almost dictated if you want to not have to lug around a laser rangefinder. If you shoot in competitions where group size is important then you'll probably be best served by second focal plane. That's a good rule of thumb but not gospel, so think about it and see what others are using in the match you want to shoot before you make a purchase.

Other competitors are going to on average have a set of features in common and are your best source of comparative shopping especially since they'll usually be pretty generous about letting your look through and compare different brands and models. Hunting at close to intermediate (
After you've figured out what purpose you're putting this gun to we can start figuring out if you need ranging capability and from there if you need advanced features like hold-overs and hold-offs and if they need to be in even intervals or not. If you don't need ranging capability, don't get it. It's just a distraction in the image if you're not using it. If you don't need BDC, don't get it. If you need a target dot, get one. In short, get what you need first. Then look at wants.

Below is a list of some of the reticles of the authors scopes and what guns they're on and some of my reasons for choosing them. These are representative of the world at large in most cases and will hopefully provide some context.

Mean Game Hunting Rifle, .30-06:
I use this for hunting in dense woods for bear and hog. Low magnification and a fine crosshair make for a rifle easy to use in bright light but not so much in low light which limits my hunting hours. Low mag is good for situational awareness. The K3 is steel tube and very rugged but it is getting long in the tooth and will eventually be replaced with something like a 3x28mm.

Metallic Silhouette Match Rifle, 7BR: Weaver T24 24x44mm AO fine crosshair & 1/8MOA dot.
Super high magnification (24x), fixed power and adjustable objective with target turrets. The thin crosshair helps me avoid canting the rifle without obscuring much of the image. The target dot makes for instinctive trigger pulling. When the dot covers some section of the metal target, shoot. Silhouette competition is done standing up without shooting aids like glove/jacket/sling and we only have to knock the target over so a hit anywhere on it is often all we really care about. Super high magnification helps me keep only 1 target in the scope at a time.

Lots of downsides makes this a bad choice for a beginner and a catastrophic choice for things like deer hunting in the woods. This is not for everyone but is popular in target sports. They're super popular with long range varmint hunters as well. It's sometimes a bit much for me but usually it's helpful to have this configuration.

Long Range Precision Match Rifle, .223rem: US Optics ST-10 TPAL MPR reticle.
This rifle is used from 200-1000m to engage metal gongs at known distances under time pressure. The MPR reticle has extreme flexibility in the reticle without getting to be a Christmas Tree. There are subtends in there that aren't actually listed, they're inferred by the user, and so this reticle takes a bit more training than a simple mil-dot system. Fixed 10x magnification is easy to use when scanning along a ridge line for concealed targets without being too much.

I have also used a 16x42 on this rifle and found that that was often too much magnification when you're moving from target to target in some stages, especially those that cover a lot of horizontal space. The smallness of the scope keeps a compact package without too much weight though the USO scopes are very heavy to begin with so the weight benefit is not that much over something like a Vortex Viper PST 6-24x.

Long Range Precision Match Rifle, .308Win: US Optics ER-25 5-25x58mm MPR reticle.
This is the big brother to my .223 match gun. If winds are too heavy for .223 I use this rifle. Having the same reticle as my ST-10 equipped .223 rifle means I have less to train for. The ER-25 is a 5-25x58mm while the ST-10 is a 10x37mm so the ER-25 is a FFP which is an irrelevance for the ST-10 since it's a fixed magnification scope. Being able to drop the magnification on the ER-25 to 5x makes targets scattered horizontally easier to find (greater field of view) and then you can just zoom in to 20-25x. 25x is too much magnification for most things so it rarely sees full magnification.

This scope is best left to tactical and tacticool sorts of pursuits in my book. It's far too heavy to be optimal for most hunting uses. This scope occasionally will see my big gun for shooting up to a mile against 2MOA steel gong targets but that's mostly because it has the adjustment range and the magnification, not because it has the perfect reticle for that. This is a super heavy and large and expensive scope.

Plains Deer Rifle, 7mm Rem Mag: Vintage 3-9x37mm 30/30 Duplex FFP.
This rifle is explicitly for shooting at deer-like beasts in open grasslands. Shots can be from 10yrds to >600yrds. The 30/30 reticle is a standard duplex reticle in the first focal plane. It's meant to match a 30 inch width regardless of magnification which is about the same size that an adult deer is long from chest to butt. You can tell by what portion of the reticle is taken up by a deer about how far that deer is from you but not with high precision. It's handy and light and gives a feature I find useful while having snag free low capped turrets, fixed parallax and an uncomplicated reticle. Uncomplicated scope, uncomplicated rifle, uncomplicated reticle. The glass isn't as bright as modern scopes but it still does a good job and is very rugged.

Alpine Big Game Hunting Rifle, 7mm Rem Mag: Leupold VX2 3-9x33mm Duplex SFP.
This rifle is explicitly for shooting at deer in the California mountains. Shots can be from 10 feet to 500 yards. The duplex reticle is in the second focal plane. It's just a basic rifle scope on a basic rifle. I find it useful to have snag free low capped turrets, fixed parallax and an uncomplicated reticle. This rifle gets walked over rocky terrain in high mountains so it needs rugged, light and simple with a crosshair that works high and low light and doesn't needlessly obscure the image.


MeccaStreisand is a long time competitive and recreational shooter, wildcatter, computer geek, exterior ballistics geek, inventor, outdoorsman, writer, husband and father. With over 20 years of experience in local and regional airgun, handgun, rifle and shotgun competitions of all sorts he competes currently in high power and smallbore metallic silhouette in the western states and long range precision and tactical matches throughout northern and central California. In his free time he wishes that he had enough free time to do anything other than wish for more free time.
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