One of our good friends who has many years of international shooting experience with air rifles (and rim fire and centre fire) has been doing some research into target sizes for us to help resolve this scoring problem, and he has come up with some interesting information to help us explain and resolve the issues we have had raised here on this thread.

Basically 6 yard air rifle shooting is not an international standard ( this is 10 meters) but a national sport that is seldom practiced in many UK target shooting clubs anymore (bell target excepted), and very few competitions are organised for the discipline since the unfortunate demise of NARPA who championed the national 6 yard standard events for us here in the UK for many years.

Previously the old adage - " if it is an air pistol you score UP and if it is an air rifle your score DOWN" may no longer apply on all targets as some of the newer 6 yard air rifle targets have been scaled rather differently to the older 6 yard air rifle targets.

Our friend spoke to Brian Woodal at the NSRA about the 6 yard AIR 7 target on our behalf (he is the man for this type of thing), and he said the Air 7 target is actually the same size as the old pre 1989 10 metre air rifle target but it is easier to shoot at 6yds and was intended to encourage newcomers to target air rifle shooting.

He did point out that the previous 6 yard air rifle target (the Air 1) was designed for outward scoring but it was made obsolete in 1989 leaving the only NSRA rifle target left that was designed for outward scoring as the .22 prone 25 yard target.

So there we have it.

The last time I shot 6 yard air rifle at a paper target it must have been in the early NARPA days and the current NSRA 6 yard air rifle target then was the AIR 1 and it was specifically designed for what we refer to as scoring DOWN.

The revised ( and current) NSRA 6 yard air rifle target is the AIR 7 and the reason why we have had the problems scoring the cards in the "traditional way" for 6 yard air rifles is because the target has been changed for specific use when scoring UP.

Now we are aware of this we should change our scoring method for this 6 yard MPL postal competition to scoring UP exactly as we do in the 6 yard MPL postal air pistol competition.

I will make a change to the first thread so anyone reading it for the first time can see that we have debated the issues caused by different competitors scoring their cards in different ways and that our "traditional" 6 yard rifle scoring DOWN method will not work since the change form the original AIR 1 targets to the current stye AIR7 targets that we are using now.