FYI, for what it is worth, MOA is a far more straight forward measurement than mils. Aren't SB's calibrated in mils?
Depends on the shooter; mils always made more sense to me (a lot of this might be basics to some, so bear with me!):
1 mil = 0.001 radians
1000 mil = 1 radian
1 radian can be thought of like this: if you took a pie and cut a piece that had an angle of 1 radian, then the length of the straight sides of the piece would be of the same length as the curved edge of the crust of the same piece.
So if your piece's angle was a mil(liradian), then the straight side of the piece would be a thousand times longer than the curved edge (i.e. a
really thin piece!).
What that means for ranging is if you know the height of an object in whatever unit you want, and you know its angular height in mils, then its distance is just 1000x its height. Example (in metric, but works if you change m to yds): if an object is covering one mil dot on your scope and you know it's 1m tall, then it's 1 km away.
Note that this form of estimation gets less accurate as the angular height of the object increases...
Mutiplying by 1000 in your head is easy... MOA, on the other hand, requires you to mutliply the object's known angular height in MOA by ~3.438 in your head; good luck with that!
Another thing that makes it practical is that, since that S&B's knobs are in mils too (0.25cm@100m/click = 0.025mils/click, according to that pic), if you see through your scope that you missed by, say, 5cm @ 500m, you know that each click is now 5*0.25=1.25cm, so just *click*, *click*, *click*, *click* and you're set.
Yup, there are S&B's in MOA as well.
