Quote Originally Posted by Muskett View Post
The above may have some truth but what has been made, well the designs that keep selling, do their job well enough.
10m pellets are capable of Olympic level of pellet on pellet.
25 practical able to do tight one hole in ideal conditions.
After that many are suited to the barrel and "hold it there".
There is only so much that can be done at these velocities which are mighty slow. Anything more would be minor.

To get more out of barrel and pellet would take a massive cost in development with minor improvement. Sure the consumers have to put up with what is offered but what is offered isn't that shoddy. A well matched combo will out shoot the shooter. That odd rogue pellet is barely worth anyones cash to remove.
There has been progress and pellets have never been better. They will get a tad better over time. However, progress will come as machinery and manufacturing techniques improve elsewhere and just filter down to the small gun market. I can't see some great leap coming in barrels and muitions anytime soon. Just slow small increments of improvement. What we have is pretty good already. We aren't yet going to be shooting lasers anytime soon.

Improved barrel and rifling to match improved pellet design to match velocities. All thre to get a tiny improvement. Shooters can't even decide which velocity they require. Gets expensive to fine tune it all for one of several markets.
At 10m the dominant factor is going to be the pellet barrel interface and the quality of the launch of the pellet as the aerodynamics will have insufficient time to make any corrections to the initial conditions. 10m is only equivalent to about one precession yaw cycle. The nutation cycles should damp out somewhat but they appear to have little effect on the impact point at the target.
25m will give time for the aerodynamics to effect flight but, under ideal conditions and with a perfect launch brought about by finding the ideal pellet for your barrel, there is nothing for the ballistics to correct. It is under less than ideal conditions such as variable wind speeds and directions etc. that projectile aeroballistics can make appreciable differences. At distances from 35-50m the potential improvements increase and may not be a minor improvement. Improving the machinery and manufacturing techniques will not change the basic ballistic properties of the diabolo pellet which will remain poor, so in this case I would agree with you that improvements will be small. That would be the engineering approach to the problem.
What is needed is a scientific as opposed to an engineering approach, but, while consumers are prepared to put up with poor wind performance, the odd fliers and the need to continually test pellets to ensure the pellet barrel matching it is simply not going to happen.