FirstOfFoot

Yup, for target shooting (ISSF style, standing unsupported - the target is at 10m, the 10-ring is a 1mm dot) I used to borrow my wife's Feinwerkbau 603. Hellish accurate over 10m if you're doing indoor target stuff... over the last twenty years, most target shooters have moved from side-lever rifles to compressed air tanks (e.g. the Feinwerkbau 800 series).

By 'eck, I wander off for six or seven years, and come back to find all the same faces posting. Couldn't resist commenting, I've spent this evening clearing cupboard space for firstborn; a full NBC suit, helmet, and respirator heading into the attic to join the rest of my old kit (gathering dust these past thirteen years). Since I left, the boots have changed (and changed colour), the camouflage has changed, the helmet, the webbing, basically everything. Except the '58 pattern water bottle. That's a keeper, they'll probably still be issuing that in a century's time

Do you end up with: no groups, and holes spread around at random one rubbish group (a group at the point of aim that's worse than your typical slow-fire group, and all of your second shots spread around randomly) one good group (a solid group at the point of aim, and all of your second shots spread around randomly) two groups (a good, solid group at the point of aim, and a looser group where you tend to flick your second shots) two groups (a good, solid group at the point of aim, and a good group where you tend to flick your second shots) one decent group with all your shots.If 1, then I'd suggest "forget double taps, get back to basics" - you're rushing all of your shots, wasting all of your ammunition, and should slow down. If 2, then I'd suggest "slow down, take the shots one at a time" - you're rushing into the second shot before you've finished the first, and wasting half of your ammunition. If 3 or 4, then you're quite right, and I'd suggest "slow down, and figure out what you're doing differently between the two shots" - you're rushing into the second shot, but at least you're completing the first shot correctly before you waste the second one. If 5, then I'd still suggest "slow down just a bit" - work at speeding up a correct aim, rather than correcting a speeding aim I'm guessing it's not 6, or you wouldn't be asking... IMHO the first big leap in performance (i.e. from beginner to intermediate) comes when the various techniques go from being conscious to being automated. The next big leap in performance (i.e. from intermediate to advanced) comes when you learn how not to pull the trigger on a bad shot...

I should say that I'm rubbish with pistols, but an experienced coach with rifle... Could you possibly be starting your shot routine for the second shot, before you've actually finished firing the first? I'd suggest taking a short trip back to basics and working on your slow-fire follow-through. Dry firing, focussing on holding the aim all the way through the trigger break and a half second to a second afterwards. The shot should release without the sights deviating. Then work on "calling the shot" (i.e. predicting the point of impact). Again slow-fire, and until you're confidently predicting exactly where each shot went and getting it right. You'll hear prone rifle shooters muttering that the rifle should return to the exact point of aim, but IMHO that's more of an indication of position stability than where the round went. The problem for many intermediate, and even advanced, shooters is that the sight picture they remember is the one they saw when they decided to shoot - not the sight picture a quarter-second later when the nerve impulses reached the trigger finger and the hammer fell. Work on following through the sight picture all the way from decision to fire, to the actual shot, and then the recoil recovery. Don't just stop watching at decision time. Once you can observe the point at which the shot breaks and the sights start to recoil away from the point of aim, you've cracked it. If you want scary, take the point of impact of your second shots, and attempt to group there on the target. Because by definition, that's where the gun was pointing when it went bang. When I'm coaching prone rifle types on ISSF targetry, I try and get them to play "21" with a three shot group - they start out by trying to put a shot in the 7-ring, actually put it in the 9-ring, and realize that yes, when they fling that 8-ring shot - that's where the sights were actually pointing, it's just that they'd stopped watching by then.

Where's Calvin? When you get an A-10 that can fly properly in the dark; has a radar, and a decent self-protection suite; and can carry out strikes over Afghanistan having launched from Diego Garcia; then you get to say that. Meanwhile, what does the A-10 offer that a combination of AH-64 (for the gun) and an F-16 (for being able to turn up quickly enough) can't? (Other than target practice when the other side manages local air parity, that is)

OK - consider the 14th Army in Burma. The Chindit columns. The Jedburgh teams. Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain (read "First Flight", by Geoffrey Wellum). A good book is "With the Jocks" by Peter White - your "weeks" figure isn't quite accurate. A local battalion (of the KOSB) fought their way across North-West Europe for the 11 months between D-Day and VE-Day, and took 1,000 casualties during that time. There was a local furniture store run by the only platoon commander in 15 PARA to survive the war intact. Consider the Battle of Kohima; where one of the rifle platoons unlucky enough to be near the tennis court could muster a single man after the battle (he allegedly asked whether he could get acting rank and pay, as he was obviously the platoon commander by now). In that battle, 1st Bn The Royal Scots started with 26 Officers and 595 Other Ranks; 2 officers and 76 ORs killed, 15 officers and 189 ORs wounded, four missing. Another good read is "McCrae's Battalion" - C Company 16th Royal Scots, nearly wiped out in the first hours of the Somme; the rest of the battalion spent the next week fighting at close quarters in the forward German trenches to hold "Scots Redoubt" near Contalmaison. Of the eleven members of the Heart of Midlothian team that joined up in 1914, seven died. 39,000 men served in the Royal Scots in WW1; over 10,000 of them died.

Actually, they do. The requirements for an indoor range in the UK (as approved in JSP403, i.e. the Army writes the specification) is to have between 0.3 and 0.5 meters per second airflow downrange. There is also the maintenance guidance that the range and particularly firing point surfaces be washable / wipable, and cleaned on a regular basis. So long as you're sensible, it isn't a problem. We take both of our kids to the range (we both shoot, they don't), we use unjacketed lead smallbore ammunition, but we control their access to the firing point and range area. We're careful about food / drink consumption, and washing their hands immediately after leaving. Meanwhile, the only concern expressed publically is about lead shot (as in "shotgun") being found in the food chain of wild birds; mostly waterfowl picking it up and leaving it in their gizzards. Here's the BASC position on the subject: http://www.basc.org.uk//en/departments/game-and-gamekeeping/game-shooting/lead-and-nonlead-shot.cfm

What, no-one's even mentioned XKCD?

Nope, Canberra PR.9 - in service until 2006. According to wikipedia, had the 4-ft wingspan extension of the RB-57B/ There was a rumour of a photo taken of a U-2 by a Canberra - from above... ...all but nothing in comparison to the WB-57F, I suppose

Only if the person running the exercise has somewhat missed the point during their briefing... If you're trying to teach detailed orders, you might start out with a simple problem, but milk it for all it's worth - even though in reality, the planning for that particular problem would take seconds, and the orders might not take much longer... ...the confusion comes when people assume that they are actually expected to take forty minutes to come up with the plan for a simple platoon attack, and another forty to write the orders, and another ten minutes to give those orders. This misses the point, and suggests that the instructors haven't progressed the class to sensible timescales, or explained why they took so long at the beginning. Or worse, they then jumped directly from the "take all the time you need" to "do it right this second" in a not-very-progressive fashion. Normally, because there isn't enough time in the day to train at all the things they'd like to do.

BG Int Cell? As for patrolling, the answer to "how big" depends on task - as small as you can get away with for a Recce Patrol, as large as you need for a Fighting Patrol. Our doctrine for specialist Recce Pls was based around four-man patrols, usually working as a mutually supporting section; six men gives you more endurance on task, not much more security, but no more coverage. The point that was often lost in training was that the likely range of a Coy-level patrol was quite short (a km or less), filling the gaps in the BG Surveillance and Target Acquisition Plan that the BG Recce assets couldn't cover. Considering "Int within COIN" has always ranked highly in pre-deployment training, hence often a dedicated Coy Ops/Int Officer in addition to the Coy 2ic.

In my final job in the TA, I had an RHA WO2 as my PSI. The first night I met him, he asked me to guess what his doorstop was... A very large, shiny, brass, domed nut. Being a smartalec, I suggested it was the wheel nut from a 13-Pdr... ...he was King's Troop, and had just done a tour as a BSM on AS90 Battery; it was the Army's way of keeping him employable. Utter horse nut - he'd done Diana's funeral with the Troop, appeared as a cavalryman in the opening battle scene of Gladiator, competed in all sorts of mounted skill-at-arms events; and last I heard he was its RSM.

I joined the UOTC in 1984, to find 105 Pack How in the RA Sub-unit; they'd handed back the 25Pdr in 82/83. It had the advantage that we could tow them with 3/4t LR instead of Bedfords... Thankfully we didn't have any lost fingers in our five years (nor did I hear of any). When we took over a TA Centre from the newly-formed local RA Regt in 1990, they moved out the 25Pdr saluting guns used at the Castle. It was that whole Pack How dicking about with the trails and unlocking the barrel unit thing when bringing the gun into action that was a pain, but if you can teach a bunch of students to do it in a couple of days... I can remember incredulity at the whole "take the wheel off to bring the 105 Lt Gun into action", but then students still manage that too.

Try a search on non-cooperative target identification (NCTI).

That's precisely where I disagree. It's far easier to see the effect of stance etc on movement with a magnifying optic sight; it's one of the reasons my wife bought a scope sight for her rifle, before we invested in a SCATT system (it was a cheaper way of achieving a lesser effect). Once you get to the last seconds of the shot routine, the full focus of the firer should be on the foresight and its relationship to the target - that is the key information for developing your hold. The foresight's relationship with the rear sight is a part of the checklist before that, and a reasonably easy one (namely, don't move your cheek on the butt).