an extra 18 MOA gets me less than 200 yards from my 243 ai 1700 to 1900 yards. I have never heard of anyone needing that much elevation travel.
I will try to be as polite as possible and in no way am I trying to insult you in any way but there are a couple points that need to be made here in regard to your comments above.
1. Your 243 AI is in no way a 1700 to 1900 yard rifle so in YOUR case, your right, you have no use for a scope like this other then its potential to have great optical quality, great consistency at any range.
2. If you have never heard of anyone needed 34 mils worth of vertical adjustment, you really need to educate yourself and see what we are doing these days at some true long range shooting. This is LONG RANGE HUNTING, not NORMAL RANGE HUNTING.com
You need to realize the playground your playing at. There are hundreds of us on this site alone that use all of this adjustment range and then some OFTEN.
You also need to realize that any scope system will be at its peak optical performance in the middle 50% of its adjustment range. 75% of the center of that adjustment range is likely good enough that you will never be able to tell a difference but if you have to adjust to the outer limits of a scopes adjustment range, you will see the difference in optical quality as well as how forgiving the scope is as far as eye position for full field of view to some degree or another. This is also effected by the overall quality of the scope but all are effected to some degree at the outer limits of their adjustment ranges.
So, if you have a 30mm scope tubed scope with 70 moa of total adjustment range, at the outer limits of the effective range of your rifle, you may have to adjust your scope out of its optimum optical range of adjustment.
Now, that is not to say that most will notice the optical change when a scope is out of their optimum adjustment range as far as optical quality but the larger the scope adjustment range, the larger the window of optimum optical quality in the adjustment range.
So by you saying you have never heard of anyone needing a scope like this..... I suggest you do some more research and see what is actually happening today in the Long range and Extreme Long range shooting sports. Its quite amazing whats going on. In fact, often times, even with scopes like this, we need 40 or even 60 moa canted rail bases and we even then reach the limits of vertical adjustment ranges.
I have even used adjustable rings that have a built in 150 moa of adjustment on a 40 moa rail base with a scope that has +120 moa of vertical adjustment and in some situations, its a perfect combination and certainly needed!!!
Just wanting to do some polite educating so you understand what some are doing out in the Extreme Long Range shooting fields....
Looking at the 243 AI for example, say you are driving a 105 gr berger VLD with a BC of roughly .55 G1 to 3100 fps which is pretty standard load for a 243 AI with this bullet weight in a long barreled rifle, with a 100 yard zero, you will need a dial up of around 68 moa at 1800 yards which will be the limit of your supersonic velocity at around 3500 ft elevation. That means that to be able to dial up to that 1800 yard zero, even if you have a 20 moa rail base, you will need a scope with at least a 100 moa total adjustment range since in a perfect world, if your rifle is zeroed at 100 yards, it should be as close to its mechanical zero as possible.
That means you have 50 moa of adjustment range on the top half of your scopes adjustment range after zeroing your rifle. Add in your 20 moa rail base and that gives you 70 moa of usible adjustment range. So in your case, you need a rifle with 100 moa of vertical adjustment range to get your rifle to dial up to an 1800 yard zero.
Now, there are not a lot of scopes that offer 100 moa of vertical adjustment ranges that do not cost at least $1000. There are some but they are very few. The NF NXS scopes easily do this but even with them, your at the outer limits of their adjustment range to dail up out to 1800 yards with your 243 AI so again, in your case, your right, YOU have no need for anything more then the best 30mm scopes.
That said, the best long range weapon systems out there, namely the best 338 super magnums out there such as my 338 Allen Magnum have the potential to drive a 300 gr berger OTM out at 3400 fps. In this case, the projectile will remain supersonic out past 3000 yards at my 3500 ft elevation. With a 100 yard zero, I need around 100 moa of adjustment from a 100 yard zero to dial up for zero hold at 3000 yards.
At 3000 yards, the very top end 338 Allen Magnum loads will retain 1100 fps velocity and over 800 ft/lbs of energy. To dial up for this range, with a 40 moa rail on the rifle, one of these scopes with their 122 moa of vertical adjustment range will get there still just barely. So with no canted rail base, you would need a scope with 200 moa of vertical adjustment range to zero at this 3000 yard range as you would need a full 100 moa of vertical adjustment on the top half of the scope adjustment range. There just are no scopes out there that offer this, well that I know of anyway. So if you take one of these scopes with 122 moa of vertical adjustment, they have 61 moa of adjustment range on the top half of their adjustment range. IF you add a 40 moa rail base to your weapon system, that gives you 101 moa of vertical adjustment range, which JUST gets you to 3000 yards.
A 50 moa rail would be even better and a 140 moa adjustment range scope would be EVEN better.
This is where the 150 moa adjustable Ivey rings can really come into their own and allow a lot of scopes to reach out to extreme range. So when you say no one needs a scope with this kind of adjustment range, you really need to do some research and see what we are doing in our sport at the extreme end of performance.
Again, no insults intended but your just starting to dabble into long range shooting performance with your 243 AI rifle. There is SO MUCH more performance out there that many of us are using to full effect!!!
There are a lot of us that NEED scopes like this and if someone developed a 40-45 mm scope that had 200 moa of vertical adjustment, there would be guys lining up to get them as we could use them to full effect as well.
