Great Range, Fun Stages, Atrocious Scores

Lone Star Gun Gallery & Gear is a *very* nice range. All shiny and new, well lit, well ventilated. The distances are substantially longer and most stages took advantage of that.

The stages were fun; lots of movement. Stage two had a swinger initiated by the shooter at the buzzer. It emulated flushing the toilet :). Stage five had three targets. The shooter had to engage in tactical priority on the advance, completing two in each target by the time you crossed a line, then cross back and place two more in each target on the retreat.

It was fun, but it was not my night to score. I had two primary failure modes. Most *often*, I missed long distance targets, but couldn’t tell with my split contact lens prescription. This makes it hard to even guess whether I need to make up shots.

The other failure was copious procedurals. Some of those long range misses were also hits on non-threat, which is a 5 second penalty. At least they don’t accumulate per target.

The prize for the silliest miss was on stage 4. I completely missed engaging a target. So one target assess 13 seconds of penalties: down 10 (5 seconds) for two misses, 3 seconds for failure to engage procedural and 5 seconds for failure to neutralize. The raw time on the stage was only 19.85 seconds.

In short, 4 out of 5 stages had penalties essentially equal to or exceeding the raw time.

It was fun shooting full power 10mm, but I presume it was at least a factor in some of my misses, especially the long distance ones. I couldn’t see well enough to tell if I missed and needed to do makeup shots and just controlling recoil is a thing with that much power. I distinctly remember at least one bad pull down, anticipating the boom. If I remember one, I’d bet there were others I didn’t catch. I have plenty of much more sane 10mm handloads and until I solve a lot of the other problems, it’s probably best not to stack the deck against myself with hot loads.

In happy news, I had no ammo issues. It did look a little like the pistol failed to go into battery once. The SO and I checked it out pretty carefully. Then and always, it operated correctly. Just the way the slide fits the frame.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.