Short barrel vs short sight radius?

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toddinjax
Posts: 303
Joined: Wed Feb 24, 2010 10:04 pm

Short barrel vs short sight radius?

Post by toddinjax »

I understand what a shorter sight radius does for perception of wobble; can someone explain the benefit of having a shorter barrel (with its shorter line of sight) as apposed to a full length barrel with shorter sight radius? Looking around online I believe saw a short barrel AP with the ability to have (at least close to) a full length radius, which defies the limited logic I have on this subject.
Thanks
David M
Posts: 1676
Joined: Wed Mar 24, 2004 6:43 pm

Re: Short barrel vs short sight radius?

Post by David M »

Short barrel, the CofG is a lot futher back in the hand than a long barrel and with the
lighter weight the wobble is a smaller but high frequency. (shown on Scatt)
The shorter barrel will bring 9.8's and 9.9's into the ten ring but the lighter
weight will cane you on poor trigger shots and push them out to the 7/8 ring.
If you have a good hold and good trigger control the shorter barrel/extended rear sight
(long sight radius) is worth a couple of points, but bad shots will cost you more.
Gwhite
Posts: 3426
Joined: Sat Sep 04, 2004 6:04 pm
Location: Massachusetts

Re: Short barrel vs short sight radius?

Post by Gwhite »

As usual, this has been beat to death in an earlier thread: https://www.targettalk.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=61980
Grippy
Posts: 94
Joined: Wed Feb 09, 2022 3:05 pm

Re: Short barrel vs short sight radius?

Post by Grippy »

Short barrels still allow you to go shorter though. It seems the range of adjustability for most modern pistols is 10% of the total sight radius or even less. To the point of almost being pointless in my opinion. It's one of those things that seems to exist to check the "adjustable sight radius" checkbox on the feature list while being a very low hanging fruit to include. But who can really tell the difference between a 360 and 330mm sight radius? Which seems to be the actual adjustability range of any pistols I recently interacted with (CM200, EVO10, P8X).

I'm unsure how some of the manufacturers arrive at their claimed numbers. FWB says the P8X can be set at 330-400mm I can see the 330mm one but 400mm is about 20mm past the front of the compensator. Maybe there is some special extended foresight as an accessory? (Edit: Apparently the way you get to 400mm on the P8X is by additionally extending the back of the sights.)

Steyr claim 316-360mm. But to get to 316 you'd have to mount the foresight backwards?

Either way. to get a noticeable shorter sight radius you do need the short versions. And even those still have significantly longer sight radii than a 25m pistol (220mm).
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