We’ve all seen somebody do this, I’m talking about finishing a course of fire and then spotting a target that’s still standing. In the next split second (while experiencing an emotional rollercoaster that might include – embarrassment at your own performance / hatred for the dastardly course design / anger at the audacity of the pesky target that you thought you’d hit with plenty of shot) you have to decide what to do! This post is all about how to decide.
1. What happened and what will it cost – if you shot at the target and missed then the penalty for a Mike is -10 and you lost out on a score of 5, so its cost you -15 but if you didn’t take a shot at the target then it gets worse with Mike (-10) + Lost score (-5) + Failure to engage (-10) = -25
Hence Rule 1 – shoot at all the targets…
2. What are your options?
You could go back and shoot it
You could leave it
You could challenge the calibration
The latter is a waste of everyone’s time if you have seen the target toppled with ease by previous shooters but you have a right under the current rules to ask for calibration and we’ve made a post all about this however 999 times in 1000 it will not be calibration, you missed, so lets get over it and move on!
3. The decision must be made as quickly as possible if you are to re-engage the target and the process involves understanding hit factors.
Hit Factor
Short stage example – lets take an example and say you take 3 seconds to spot and then re-engage the missed target, this is a short stage with 8 targets and you have shot it in 4 seconds:
- A clean score is 40 so shot in 4 seconds – hit factor is 10.00
- The missed target looses 15 of those points so your score is now 25 – hit factor is 6.25
- If you didn’t engage it then your score is down to 15 – hit factor is 3.75
- If you fixed the Mike with an extra shot but added 3 seconds doing this – hit factor is 5.71
Bottom line here is that the miss was better than the top-up, unless it was a failure to engage.
Long stage example – lets take another example and say you spot and then re-engage a missed target but this time its on a stage with 24 targets and you have shot it in 30 seconds:
- A clean score is 120, shot in 30 seconds – hit factor is 4.00
- The missed target looses 15 of those points takin the score to 105 – hit factor is 3.50
- If you didn’t engage it then your score is down to 95 – hit factor is 3.16
Now this is a long stage and we have to factor in where you have to go to get the target!
- If it is shootable from where you finish and you only add 3 seconds – hit factor is 3.63
- If its way back up the stage and you add 10 seconds – 3.00
