Thanks Al, I got third in steelmaster which is the aggregate of your two main match scores, pretty happy about that! I have a flight delay now so I'll try to explain scoring the simple way.
Before I go into comstock (points divided by time) let's look at straight time. It's easy because whoever shoots the fastest and hits the targets, wins. It doesn't matter if you hit a or d hits on a target, they all count the same. A missed target is a time penalty, usually 3-5 seconds. It's easy to explain that you shouldn't take 25 seconds to hit something, you are better off taking one shot ( to avoid additional penalties) and leaving it. Yes, it's the gamey way but we are talking about getting the best score here.
If I'm shooting straight time, I treat every target as a piece of steel that doesn't ring. You have to hit it but it doesn't matter where. It's like a sypteel challenge plate. If you see white around your dot or sight, you are good to go. Simple scores but can make your shooting get sloppy. Wild Rose used to score like this, but changed because most of us felt scoring would be better. Who knows, the may change it back some day.
Comstock scoring is taking the points you collected on the targets and dividing it by the time it took you. In ipsc/uspsa, you are actually running around collecting all the points you can, like PAC-man.
Time can change the point value and time value changes too. Ask yourself this right now, how important is one second?
Did you say not very? In a three gun stage that the best shooter does in 100 seconds, the value would be 1%, not much at all. If there are 200 points on that stage, you should try to get at least 195 of them. If you look at my stages, you will see that I shot almost all of the available points. I had to, even though I spent extra time to do it.
In the above stage, a second is worth two points. If you beat someone by 5 seconds, you will gain 10 points. If you beat them by five seconds but have one miss, the will be ahead even though they were slower.
Next stage has 8 close targets (40) points and the top guy shot it in 3 seconds. If you shoot it 1 second faster, he will only get 2/3 of the points, and that would be about 66% of your score. At 2 seconds, the hit factor will be 20, making a secon worth 20 points. This is why you can give up a few points here to push the speed.
One more thing to mention. Let's suppose you shoot 75% of the winners points and do it in 75% of the time. Your score will not be 75%, it will actually be ony a little over 50. You lost 25% of the possible points by not shooting them and in addition! you lost 25% of the points by shooting slower..
If something's not clear, let me know. My examples may seem extreme but we really have stages like this. For new shooters, in general, you should just try for a's as fast as you can but if you want to know the value of points/time, guess at a good time and good score and once you divide it, you will know how much a second is actually worth on that stage.