I have been studying the course of fire and have some concerns about Match 3 - Three Position Heartbreak.
The match procedure states -
"Shooter will start the match in the standing position. Upon presentation of the target, shooter will fire five (5) shots into any one size of the ten circles. Shooter will then transition to the sitting position and fire five (5) shots into any one of the four sizes of remaining circles. Shooter will then transition to the prone position and fire five (5) shots into any one of the three sizes of remaining circles."
Scoring -
"Small dot is ten (10) points per hit, next larger dot is seven (7) points per hit, next larger dot is five (5) points per hit, next larger dot is three (3) points per hit and largest dot is one (1) point per hit. A miss results in a 10% reduction in overall match score with ten or more misses resulting in a score of zero. Unfired rounds count as misses."
My concerns and questions are as follows:
1: Since it is more advantageous from a score point of view to shoot at the smaller circles there is the distinct possibility, especially while standing, that more than one circle will be hit. My reading of the rules lead me to believe that the intention is to shoot at one circle ( your choice ) in any given position. So, the question is; what happens if you hit a different circle than the one you were obviously aiming at ? Would that be counted as a miss ? And, if you were shooting at one of the smaller circles in the offhand and sitting positions, it might become difficult to tell which one was the actual primary target. Is there a procedure to deal with this possibility ?
2: What is the definition of "sitting" ? Does that mean you have your butt on the ground or can you sit on one foot in the combat kneeling position ?
3: I hesitate to bring up this concern, but in the interests of fair play I feel I must.
What is to stop anybody from ( I will use the proper term here ) cheating ? Unless there is an RO watching every single shooter, it would be very easy to, say, shoot 4 shots offhand, then perhaps 6 shots sitting, and 5 shots prone. OR other variations which would give the advantage of shooting in a more stable position. This possibility comes about because there is no way to tell which shots were fired in any given position.
4: During the prone portion it is most likely that everyone will be shooting at the smallest circle. As far as I can tell that will be a 1 MOA circle at 100m. Now, I know that I can, and am sure that most others can put more than one bullet through the same hole at 100m. So, this then leaves the scoring folks with some real problems. I submit it is not possible to properly score this portion because only the shooter will know where all his bullets have gone. Unless the shooter deliberately tries to avoid the one hole problem, in which case he is actually trying to reduce his accuracy, there will no doubt be lots of challenges to the scoring.
It seems to me that most of the issues I have raised stem directly from the fact that this course of fire is non-stop multi target from multi positions with no way to differentiate what happened when. If you look at any of the other courses of fire, there no question of who shot when and where (though the one hole problem still exists and should be carefully looked for by the scorers). The only way I can see to alleviate some of the problems might be to use separate targets for each portion, but that still doesn't solve problem 3.
Release the Hounds !
